New patch, NewJeans, new changes—welcome to patch 13.20!
In this patch we have some pretty big changes, namely to the jungle and snowballing mechanics. For the jungle, our goals are twofold: first, we want to lower the power of the jungle as a role. Junglers are of supreme importance in the mid and late game due to their exceptional control over epic monsters, which means they do not need to be as dominant as they are in PvP interactions. Second, we want to ensure the role is satisfying to play. Lowering some of the stress around Smiting epic monsters with targeting forgiveness and protecting camps from non-jungle poaching should ensure they're able to perform. With regards to snowballing in League, our main goal is to decelerate how quickly teams can snowball early leads so that everyone can access other fun parts of the mid to late game like team fighting and objective planning that should have a bigger role in deciding games. We've got quite a few changes on these topics, so make sure you read more down below! We also have our usual balance adjustments as well, with some larger changes to K'Sante and more moderate ones for champs like Morgana and Bel'Veth.
We also have a lot of drops that you won't want to miss out on in this patch as well, like the Jax visual update, another round of additions to the Coven skin line, and last, but certainly not least, the much requested adaptation of Redeemed Xayah and Rakan for League! We'll also be updating the loading screen on Summoner's Rift to a new one celebrating the 2023 Worlds Championship.
Lastly we have some follow up adjustments to the ranked restrictions and ping adjustments from the last patch based on player feedback, so make sure to check those out as well.
Looking for the new TFT patch instead? You can check out their newest patch, Portals Remastered, using this portal to the TFT patch notes here!
Worlds 2023 Renekton, Coven Nami, Coven Nilah, Coven Akali, Coven Elise, Old God Mordekaiser, and Prestige Coven Akali will be available October 11, 2023 at 18:00 UTC. Coven Syndra has been delayed to next patch.
Redeemed Star Guardian Xayah and Rakan will be made available for purchase this patch for 1820 RP each. If you own the original Star Guardian skin, you can get the Redeemed version of the same champion for 45% off (1001 RP). If you get the Redeemed version first, you can get the original for 45% off as well. They will be available for purchase until December 31, 2023 at which point they will be removed from the shop.
Q bonus movement speed decreased. E base damage decreased.
Akshan has been doing a bit too well in skilled and Elite brackets of solo queue and could use some toning down. In this patch we're targeting his early game as it tends to be more Elite skewed. He's currently too dominant in lane, and since we just buffed his late game functionality in 13.17, we'll be reducing his early Q movement speed and E base damage which are most utilized by high skill Akshan players. These nerfs are intended to make it more possible for opponents to trade with him while still retaining his passive and early game strength.
Passive bonus attack speed after spell cast decreased. E can now critically strike, damage reduction decreased, minimum damage adjusted, on hit damage increased. R Remora health adjusted.
Our Void queen has been dominating the early game jungle in higher skill brackets of play, which doesn't seem quite right given that she's supposed to be a late game scaling champion. Our goal with this change list is to shift power away from her early game and bruiser builds and into her builds that prioritize late game scaling and critical strikes.
W cooldown decreased, shield restoration time decreased.
Our Galio buff from last patch wasn't as impactful as we had hoped for, and as we're looking to give him more power back, we wanted to take the changes a little bit further this time. He could use some help after the laning phase, so we're targeting his later game durability. Both the passive and active on his W retain high cooldowns throughout the game, so we decided to increase their uptime. With these changes we intend to make his unique anti-mage outputs stand out more and give him the much needed survivability a melee champion who has to get into close range in teamfights needs.
Health growth increased. Passive bonus total attack speed now stacks. R cooldown decreased, base damage increased, AD scaling increased.
Jinx had a blast at MSI this year, but after the nerfs post-MSI and ADC itemization changes that came afterwards, she's been having a tough time. This set of changes is aimed at increasing her power in average skill brackets without putting her over the line in Pro play come the beginning of next year. Get excited, because we have a Get Excited! Buff that players should really appreciate alongside a little extra explosive power in her Super Mega Death Rocket.
All abilities adjusted.
K'Sante has been suffering in average play due to needing to balance him around Pro since his launch. Once mastered, he leaves little room for reaction and his opponents will often find themselves dead while being stunned the whole time. After all, it doesn't matter how good Showmaker is if K'Sante can hit-confirm his whole combo via an instant cast spell. Meanwhile, most players won't even know what that means.
The changes here broadly serve two goals: the first is to slow down the beginning of K'Sante's combos: Path Maker now has a minimum channel time and he cannot Flash during Q3. Both of these changes will allow skilled players to outplay his incoming combos which was difficult to do before. However, if these more difficult skill shots land, K'Sante can combo his abilities together just as before.
The second set of goals aims to give K'Sante stronger overall abilities now that his counterplay has been improved. This means much stronger stuns and damage from W plus more reliable upsides from All Out.
Base armor decreased.
Kai'Sa is an extremely common marksman in high skill brackets. The fact that she's so frequently blind pickable in high-skilled play has led us to believe she doesn't have enough weaknesses. As a very mobile and strong scaler with incredible build variety (totally reasonable strengths!) she needs to have weaknesses that skilled players can punish. Thus, we're targeting her early laning phase without trying to take away too much of her overall power.
Burn damage dealt by allies now procs Milio's items. E cooldown decreased, base shield strength increased. R healing AP ratio increased.
Milio's been feeling pretty down after his heavy passive and protection nerfs due to his extremely strong showing in Pro earlier this year. With these changes we're looking to bring back some power that was taken away and add exciting systemic interactions with a meaningful change to his passive.
W AP ratio increased, damage to monsters increased. E cooldown increased early. R movement speed increased, stun duration increased, magic damage increased.
Morgana has felt weak for a while, but it's been difficult to buff her due to her high ban rate. This patch, we're buffing her ult to ensure it continues to be worth casting as the game progresses, but slightly increasing the E cooldown to give CC supports more windows to interact with her. We're also helping out her midlane and jungle with buffs to W scaling.
Base health decreased, base movement speed decreased, attack damage growth increased.
We made changes to Quinn in 13.17 after we identified she was getting incredibly squishy due to build changes after the midseason item update. While we tried to compensate for some increased midgame durability buffs with some base damage nerfs, she ended up stronger overall, which wasn't our goal. This patch, we're taking a more holistic look at the champion with two goals: nerfing her on average and granting her better gameplay for her and her opponents.
Why base health? This places her much closer to other ranged top laners with strong anti-melee tools like Mini Gnar and Teemo. We still believe in the goals and results of increasing her health scaling, but she doesn't really need strong durability in the laning phase. The move speed nerf is part of a long-term effort to rein in the overall movement speed in the game. In Quinn's case, she already has substantial movement speed buffs through W and R, so she isn't really going to be missing it too much.
W cooldown increased.
While the vast majority of Zed players max Q first and E second, W max second is currently better and is growing in popularity among high-skill brackets of play. This is giving Zed expectation-breaking ability uptime, as he's also acquiring plenty of haste through his item builds. Since we're addressing the items with the 2024 gameplay changes, we're looking to nerf his incentive for maxing W directly. This is mostly intended to nerf the W max second optimization while not affecting the majority of Zed players, as they put their second point in W at level 14 when they already have a lot of haste.
Q hitbox increased.
Ziggs hasn't been his bubbly booming self recently, so we're giving him a buff that we hope his mains will appreciate. His Q, while intended to be a bit unreliable, could miss in situations where players expect it to land, so we're looking to revert the nerf all the way back from 4.11 (that's right, Riot Games remembers). We believe in his current state there's room for us to increase the radius of his Q while still retaining its unreliable theme.
Blighting Jewel was nerfed in the durability update of 12.10 when all champions gained extra Magic Resist and as a result is an underpowered epic item. We don't think it needs to be weak, but still shouldn't be an item players are comfortable sitting on without upgrading all the way to Void Staff as we'd like to reserve important power spikes for full item completions.
Duskblade has proven resilient to recent nerfs and is still too powerful, getting poached by other classes more than we're comfortable with. We made some fighter adjustments a few patches ago that helped those champions find support with new builds, but now we're turning our attention to Duskblade itself. Assassins fear not: we're also buffing Youmuu's this patch so that your favorite champion should have appropriately strong lethality options in case Duskblade isn't pulling its weight any more.
Ability haste and generic damage amplification are our targets now because these are the most class-agnostic stats on the item. Low health champions frequently die to assassins already and their burst combos rarely care about ability haste against an individual target. Duskblade will still have the most haste late game due to its Mythic Passive, but this will slightly reduce cases of champions poaching the item.
The current damage amplification from LDR's passive, Giant Slayer, was calculated as pre-application, meaning it triggered after things like shields and lifesteal. In this patch, we'll be moving it to pre-mitigation, which should be more intuitive to how players think about and use the item. Since this will result in a power increase for the item, we're proactively giving it a small nerf to avoid overpowering it.
Youmuu's Ghostblade isn't pulling its weight for assassins who want to get into fights and burst their primary target quickly. Instead, it's got a few decent marksman users. Youmuu's has a strong mechanic for start-of-fight lethality, so a buff to Haunt should disproportionately buff assassins without giving as much power to marksmen.
We're updating Smite to make it more user-friendly. If your cursor is on top of a Large or Epic monster, minion, or champion, it will Smite that target, just as it always has. However, if your cursor isn't hovering over an allowed target, it will automatically target the closest Epic monster within a small radius. This means junglers can still Smite Dragons or Baron even with a massive Cho'Gath in the way simply by moving their cursor off to the side. We still think it's valuable for timing to matter, but requiring precise aiming for Smite is not something we want to subject junglers to. Otherwise, we're lowering Smite's overall damage output when aimed at enemy champions and pets. It's now primarily meant to be a slow with some minor damage attached, as opposed to an actual true damage nuke.
JUNGLE COMPANION UPGRADES
Our goals with these changes are to trim some hard-to-appreciate or simply overpowered aspects of the avatar upgrades. For example, most players haven't noticed the epic monster damage reduction. Mosstomper's tenacity made it too hard to disengage from enemy junglers, and Gustwalker's move speed made it too easy for junglers to cross the map quickly. We'll keep an eye out for jungle item balance after this patch to ensure that each of the pets still has a viable place on the roster.
NORMAL CAMP HEALTH
With these changes we're looking to slightly slow down clears after the first clear, with level 1 and 2 being identical to how they are today. The biggest addition here is that health now scales past level 11 as champions continue to gain damage, since all other respawning sources of gold, like minions, Epic monsters, and champions all do. Blue and Red buff scale harder late game than regular monsters, since they provide twice the number of buffs that they used to. The raptors change will slightly close the gap between AoE and single-target junglers, who typically wait for their pet to clean up small raptors anyway.
MONSTER HEALTH VALUES
MONSTER HEALTH SCALING FORMULAS
For those of you looking to put all these numbers into a spreadsheet, this one's for you.
RIFT SCUTTLER
Rift Scuttler is an important objective, which means it needs to have an appropriate amount of health for its value. Its rewards also need to align better with other jungle camps. Since other camps only scale in experience while Scuttler increases in both gold and XP, we've adjusted Scuttler's rewards to now scale more slowly.
MONSTER ATTACK DAMAGE AND CHAMPION CLEAR HEALTH
With this list of changes we're taking a small swing at the shape of jungle clears. We have a few goals here: first, we're trying to limit the degree that junglers can fully heal from a short trip to their jungle. Capping the pet heal per second and converting the monster kill heal into percent missing health should keep junglers from easily healing back up to full. Because healing is lower on average, we're slightly reducing monster attack damage in the early game and otherwise just smoothing out AD progression in the late game. It's worth remembering that large monsters also deal some percent current health damage, so these changes are actually pretty small in practice.
Finally, we're updating the jungle pet scaling rules. As they are today, buying resistances is substantially worse than buying bonus health, which unfairly hurts tanks depending on their builds. These changes will mean companions will scale equally as well regardless of whether their owner itemizes health, armor, or magic resist. Meanwhile, we're lowering the conversion of offensive stats (AD and AP) into pet damage, since they already increase clear speed on their own. Due to the substantial increase in pet damage through armor/MR scaling, we're implementing a generous cap onto pet healing, which mostly just exists for edge cases like Rammus, who creates a huge amount of bonus armor.
MONSTER ATTACK DAMAGE FORMULA
SUSTAIN IN THE JUNGLE
JUNGLE COMPANION SCALING
ANTI-POACHING ADJUSTMENTS
Junglers should not feel the following changes, but they should be something laners will feel. Mathematically, camps now have 20% more health for non-junglers while junglers themselves won't notice a thing (unless of course they don't buy a jungle item). This means that laners will have to rely on lane minions a bit more than they currently do and junglers will find their camps poached less often than they currently do today.
LANE MINION EXPERIENCE ADJUSTMENTS FOR JUNGLERS
Because we're enacting some protection for junglers to have their own camps available, we'll also be implementing some changes to disincentivize junglers from poaching lane minions. We're updating the "catch-up experience" rules from the minion penalty to match the monster penalty change from a few patches ago. We're also marking the 20-minute Baron spawn as the more obvious change in game state that alleviates the jungle minion experience rules as opposed to the less obvious 14 minute mark. While we're here, we've also fixed a bug that locked junglers into their current experience penalty whenever they finished their jungle item. Overall, these changes amount to roughly 8% less minion experience than they give today for the early and mid game.
STARTER ITEM BUFFS
At the moment, we don't intend to make the jungle itself any scarier, but we'd like to lower the power of early ganks a tad. Because we can't really change the strength of low-level monster caps, we instead have to approach it from the angle of increasing the power of laners themselves. We're buffing up non-jungle starting items to give these laners a tiny bit more power for whenever they do have to interact with junglers.
Waterwalking is providing a bit too much movement speed relative to its other effects. Long duration in-combat move speed is a less noticeable yet very powerful skill for champions to have, so we're lowering the amount of movement speed (and ultimately roaming and catchup speed) that this rune provides. As compensation, we're significantly increasing the amount of Adaptive Force the rune provides. Though the level 18 value is unchanged, most games don't end that late, so this rune should still consistently provide a meaningful leg up in any river fight.
Snowballing in League currently happens very quickly which leads to a large amount of games feeling like they're being decided 15 minutes in. This doesn't allow players to experience a lot of the other fun aspects of League outside of the laning phase, like late game teamfighting, objective contesting and planning, satisfying item breakpoints, and macro play. This problem is more prevalent in high levels of play, but it still happens more than we're comfortable with in all skill brackets. To address this, we're making adjustments to many of the systems in League that contribute to the issue of how quickly games are decided. Whether it's through gold not affecting rune outputs quite so much, shorter death timers allowing behind players to get back to lane sooner, or dragons not offering as many stats for the winning team, these are all intended to create more time to play before a game feels decided.
Our primary goal is to decelerate how quickly teams can snowball early leads so that everyone can access other fun parts of the mid to late game which we believe should have a bigger role in deciding games. These changes will reduce the amount of games that are/feel doomed at 15 minutes, and ultimately increase the quality of solo queue games as a result.
DRAGON SLAYER
Drakes currently offer a sizable amount of stats that the winning team generally gets access to. While contesting drakes is valuable to the game in both solo queue and Pro play, we believe there's room to reduce the amount of stats that the Dragon Slayer stacks give, and to buff the souls to incentivize still taking them. We're not including Chemtech among these changes since the power level of the Dragon Slayer stack and the soul is already in a reasonable state.
DRAGON SOUL
RIFT HERALD
Rift Herald contributes plenty to snowballed game states due to the large amount of gold on kill, the empowered recall, and the Herald itself solidifying leads (not to mention the tower plate gold it can potentially secure). We believe there's room to reduce the amount of reward that it gives, and we're targeting the local gold amount to limit the amount of gold the jungler receives both when soloing it and when taking it with a teammate.
BARON NASHOR
Baron is currently too reliable to take safely and too fast to burst down due to the increased damage and durability in the game. This gives the winning team access to a very decisive objective post-20 minutes, and increasing its health will prevent Baron from being bursted down quickly, making the objective more contestable for the other team.
DEATH TIMER ADJUSTMENTS
As part of reducing overall snowballing, we'll be reducing early death timers, as dying once in lane can be quite punishing today. Aside from the gold/experience reward on kill, one's opponent can often get a minion advantage, turret plates, get closer to securing the first turret gold bonus, and then recall to get an item lead. Reducing the death timers is intended to reduce access to those post-kill rewards since players will be getting back to lane sooner.
TURRET PLATING
Similar to the reasoning for the death timer adjustments, we're also reducing turret plate gold as a way to reduce the amount of rewards ahead players can get access to. This amount of gold should still be satisfying and rewarding in the event a player can get a turret plate, but won't be as detrimental to the opposing laner.
While most of the changes we've talked about thus far target gold access, these adjustments target how effective gold is in the rune system. The goal is to reduce snowballing by decreasing gold scaling through the rune system, as players already get plenty of power from item and experience leads, not to mention the ratios on these runes are more of a hidden power. Even though our main intention is to reduce snowballing, a secondary goal of these adjustments is to reduce the amount of damage in League. Our approach to these changes was to increase the base values of these Runes so that they are still reasonably impactful early game, but have them start to fall off once more items and other means of damage are purchased.
BUFFS
NERFS
Following up on the ranked restrictions we introduced last patch, we're going to remove the ability for ARAM and Rotating/Event Game Mode games to count towards reducing the ranked restriction penalty based on player feedback.
In this patch we're continuing to fine tune the ping adjustments introduced in the last patch, making sure we're considering player feedback as we make them. We want to continue to empower players to communicate, but in ways that aren't frequently misused to harass other players. Tools like objective planning and the addition of new ping types last year were a big step in creating more ways for players to communicate, but they weren't perfect. And as we've been looking at how players have used these tools, it's become clear how they have been misused as well.
Our goal is to continue to provide access to these tools, while limiting their ability to be used in abusive ways. Due to their low usage rates, we've opted to replace the “bait” and “hold” pings with the more frequently used “enemy vision” and “need vision” pings on the main ping wheel, eliminating the complications of having a secondary vision ping wheel in the process. We will continue to monitor usage and read player feedback about these changes going forward.
Worlds is here! Team formation for the first weekend of Worlds Clash will be open starting on October 9th and the tournaments will be on October 14th and 15th. The second weekend of Worlds Clash will run in Patch 13.21.
In addition to the Trophy, Banner, and Logo rewards of other Clash tournaments, Worlds Clash has an additional Loot Capsule as a reward. The Capsule contains the following:
Since Worlds Clash is 16-team bracket instead of the usual 8-team bracket, there will be an additional level of rewards based on number of wins/losses in the orbs and capsules:
In this patch we'll be introducing a new version of PAX Jax alongside his visual update; this skin is aptly named “Neo PAX Jax.” For original PAX Jax owners, you'll be receiving this skin for free within the next few patches, no action required. If you didn't own the original PAX Jax, fear not, you can drop by the Mythic Shop and pick Neo PAX Jax up for 200 Mythic Essence.
(Note: if you are an original PAX Jax owner and do not receive Neo PAX Jax by patch 13.24 (December 6, 2023), or you accidentally buy him for Mythic Essence despite him being eligible to receive it for free, please reach out to Player Support for assistance. In addition, to preserve the rarity of PAX Jax for players that have it, the original will not be made available for purchase. )
NOW AVAILABLE
LEAVING THE MYTHIC SHOP
The following skins will be released in this patch:
Coven Syndra has been delayed to next patch.
The following chromas will be released this patch: