An unpleasant and thoroughly irritating bug has reared its ugly head in League of Legends once again. What makes it all the more irritating is that affected players have basically been told by League developer Riot that they just have to sit tight and make do for the time being.
The bug in question causes problems with a specific in-game item known as "Guardian Angel," or GA for short. This is a high-level-ish set of armor that can be picked up during any given game—though acquiring it usually takes a little while since it's relatively expensive, and therefore requires you to amass enough gold by doing normal League stuff like destroying enemy towers and killing minions and opposing champions. Guardian Angel is a relatively powerful item once you do pick it up, though, because the armor revives your champion and restores some of his or her health after you get killed in the line of battle.
League players have been confronted with a number of bugs tied to Guardian Angel in the past—reporting sudden defects with relevant champions when trying to take advantage of the item during a game. The latest GA problem surfaced yesterday thanks to a post on the League of Legends forums by a player using it with Rek'Sai, a creepy worm-like champion. The player said that Rek'Sai's attack speed was suddenly plummeting after the worm was killed and then revived thanks to the GA-activated ability.
Another League player who goes by the handle Spidergoose LoL on YouTube captured footage of Rek'Sai's GA Bug in action:
A Riot representative chimed in on an ensuing Reddit thread to say that the developer is aware of the bug and "has already put in the fix" for it, though it won't make the upcoming 5.4 patch.
The bug isn't game-breaking by any means. But it messes up the affected champion enough that it could easily cost unlucky players a match—especially if it takes them by surprise. And since Guardian Angel isn't only available to Rek'Sai, bugs like this can trigger a more general anxiety about performance issues whenever they start showing up. A Riot representative told me today that the current bug is only having an impact on Rek'Sai, and that it should be fixed by patch 5.5.
Other League players have been reporting problems with GA in smaller threads on the game's official forums and the popular subreddit, saying that they think it might have an impact on some of the other game's champions. A small number of players, for instance, recently inquired about a peculiar issue when using GA with Kalista, another League champion, saying that it causes her to autoattack. Those issues could be entirely unrelated in any technical sense. But if they are, that would also suggest that Guardian Angel isn't all that stable of an item for more than one reason.
For the time being, the best method League players have at their disposal to avoid the GA bug is to stay away from the item when playing games with Rek'Sai.
To contact the author of this post, write to yannick.lejacq@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter at @YannickLeJacq.