Eternals are just ways to show off with no serious benefits. You can see your numbers get big, opponents can see your big numbers when you murder them, and with enough levels earned on them you’ll get to make your Mastery Emote snazzier. Technically the eponymous Eternals are gods but they’re really just a way to flex. After scrapping an attempt to launch them in August, Riot think they’ve got the measure of them now.
Riot said in yesterday’s dev update that “it was clear from your feedback after our PBE reveal that we missed the mark in a few key areas.” They focused on three problems: Eternals were only sold for Riot Points, which cost real money; it’d be ridiculously expensive to get Eternals for more than one or two characters; and lots of the stats tracked were boring. So they’re working on all that. A lot of the original Eternals tracked generic stats, things not really worth boasting about. That’s changing. On Vladimir, for example, his generic “Duration of enemy champions slowed by abilities, items, and runes” and “Enemy champions killed” stats have been replaced with two new ones specific to his skills. Some skill-specific stats on other characters are tweaked to track more niche or interesting numbers too. Eternals will no longer only be sold for premium microtransaction cash too. The new plan includes a Starter Series tier of Eternals which can be unlocked for 2500 Blue Essence per character. These Starter flexes are relatively bland (tracking takedowns, buildings bashed, and epic monsters killed) but hey, they’re numbers you can earn without paying cash for Riot Points. With the fancier Series 1, folks who have play lots of different wizards and would want Eternals for them all will be able to buy the entire Series at a big discount for 5850 RP (about £40). They still sound expensive, especially considering the Series 1 name implied Riot plan to add more, but Eternals are a niche novelty and hell, they’re vanity items in a free-to-play game.