Teamfight Tactics, Riot’s take on the auto battler genre, officially launched in Australia this week. But if you’re jumping into the game, there’s a huge bug that you should be aware of.
The bug revolves around melee champions, and how they acquire targets. At the start of a match, all champions will pick the nearest target, and wander their way towards it via the shortest path possible until they get in range.
Ranged heroes don’t usually have any issue, but there’s a massive bug with melee heroes. As explained by August Browning, a champion designer at Riot who worked on the spells and balancing for Teamfight Tactics, the current TFT build has a problem whenever melee heroes are blocked.
Playing through TFT on stream, Browning explained that if a melee hero doesn’t have a path to their target, they won’t reacquire a second target until either that target is killed. It basically means your melee heroes will effectively be useless in the meantime.
“We’re working on a fix, it’s probably not going to be until 9.14, the next patch,” Browning said.
The next patch rolling out worldwide, which makes TFT playable worldwide on a staggered release (Australian, New Zealand and Japanese players have access to TFT already), is version 9.13. Patch 9.14 isn’t likely to show up for at least a few weeks, meaning that the likely TFT meta will probably be dominated by as few tanks as possible — because there’s not much good having four or five tanks if they get stuck.
As with any auto battler, you can mitigate some of the problem with good positioning. An option is to space out all your units with a one-cell gap, rather than clustering everyone in a tiny square. Making sure your tanks are at the front lines to begin with (rather than the sides or the rear) is also another option.
Whatever you decide to do, just know that if your melee champions are standing around doing nothing — don’t worry, it’s not you. It’s a known bug, and it’s being worked on, but don’t expect a fix until the end of July.
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