Launch sequence ready to begin. Rockets ready. Check. Engine on. Check. Slippery sea creature and shocked Yordle. Check? PATCH 13.4 IS A GO, LIFTOFF!
We’ve got a doozy of a patch for you this week with 28 balance adjustments! In this patch all of the support gold income items get fine tuned, clear speed time is being slowed down a tad, Maokai gets his power trimmed, Thresh is getting hooked on a new skill level order, and Veigar (our favorite short king) gets some range increases on his abilities. In other news, we’re introducing the /muteself and /deafen functions, party chat, and finally increasing the amount of LP gained per win. But be careful, the amount you lose has increased as well.
Looking to make some sick LP gains on the convergence? In that case, you should really check out the TFT patch notes here!
Base health increased, base armor increased. R cooldown decreased.
While she saw a lot of time in the spotlight last season, Ahri disappeared when her mains needed her most, partly because of the nerfs she saw going into Worlds. Even after one buff she’s still having a hard time keeping up with her competition, struggling to find positive trades or use her Spirit Rush aggressively. We’re slightly increasing her base durability so she has an easier time in lane before roaming like the free fox she is.
Passive ally heal increased. Q AP scaling increased. W AP scaling increased.
Despite our best intentions, Alistar lost out last patch. Turns out his teamfight healing is pretty important. For those of you who are fans of Wizard Cow, he doesn't appear to be very good as a mage and we're not intending for that to be the case any time soon. These AP ratio buffs are simply to make stat shards and other sources of Ability Power feel good.
Health growth decreased, armor growth decreased. W percent health damage decreased.
Amumu is an incredibly strong jungler, specifically in lower skill levels. His late game baseline power tends to disproportionately affect that bracket, so we’re looking to address that skill skew with these changes. His support gameplay will catch some stray nerfs here, which is fine since he’s also quite powerful there.
Health growth decreased, armor growth decreased.
Outside of one rather blue man, Anivia’s been one of the biggest winners from the Seraph’s x Rod of Ages buffs. She’s now getting much more value out of her newfound durability, thriving against shorter ranged targets. We’re bringing down her durability scaling a bit in exchange for the newly found durability in her items. This should help opponents punish Anivia more when her cooldowns are, well… down.
Base health decreased. E damage decreased. R cooldown increased.
Annie and Tibbers have made a big impact on the rift following their most recent gameplay updates. While we believe Annie deserves to be effective, she is overperforming relative to her peers in both Mid and Support, and could do with a little less power. We are aiming to bring down her base health pool to give opponents early counter-play, reduce her ambient damage from her shield, and limit the summon frequency of Tibbers now that he's more of a threat on the Rift.
Passive bonus attack speed increased.
Aphelios’ big brain doesn't have quite enough wrinkles to find wins in solo queue nor enough fans in pro play. As such, Aphelios is receiving some relatively simple buffs. The choice of attack speed on his W rank up is to make the choice between attack speed and lethality a tight one, giving smart players one more avenue for optimizing their damage.
Mana adjusted. W soldier recharge time increased. E damage increased. R damage increased.
After Kassadin and Ryze received nerfs earlier this year, Azir has become the go-to mid laner in pro play (imagine that), which is a throne the emperor has resided upon comfortably for years. These changes are meant to lower his oppressive early lane pressure and give him compensation that likely results in overall buffs in the hands of non-pros.
Armor growth increased. Q mana cost decreased, base damage increased. W mana cost decreased.
Cho'Gath is a champion that has fallen behind in the meta due to his lackluster late game presence where his damage falls off significantly and his mana costs make it hard for him to stay out on the map after a single fight. These changes are aimed at relieving some of these issues and making Cho feel better to play.
Q base damage decreased. Spiderling base damage decreased.
Elise has been lethal recently, and between her clear speed and potent first blood threat, she’s becoming the queen of the jungle instead of the queen of spiders. We’re reducing some base damage on her Q to curb first blood potential and tapping down spiderling damage to slow her clear a tad so she isn’t head and thorax above the competition.
W cooldown increased, shield strength AD scaling decreased.
Last patch we gave Jarvan a shiny new AD ratio which did wonders for his W. Unfortunately it also pushed him into the top tier of junglers. While we like his shield having some real power, we’re rolling back a bit of the buff last patch so he’s just a bit less durable when he’s snowballing a lead.
Base health increased, health growth increased. E AP ratio adjusted, damage calculation adjusted. R passive on-hit damage decreased, bonus armor and magic resist decreased early.
Jax is intended to be a late game monster, but his recent update made him a bit too strong during his laning phase, especially once he gets a point into his new ultimate. We're hitting his early game with a small nerf while leaving his powerful late game intact. We’re also adjusting his E so it's more rewarding with the more attacks you dodge.
W cooldown decreased, armor scaling on W attacks increased.
Malphite's sustained damage as a tank juggernaut is fairly underwhelming at the moment. So we’re aiming to keep his damage relevant throughout the game and allow him to have higher uptime on W for more powerful auto resets throughout a longer fight.
Q damage increased. E cooldown increased, base damage decreased, AP ratio decreased, slow HP ratio increased, slow AP ratio decreased.
Maokai is way too strong right now and incredibly frustrating with his sapling bombs which are meant to be zoning/vision tools, NOT damage ones. While AP tree is a compelling build, there's no risk to crafting a glass cannon when no one ever comes near to it. The Sapling cooldown nerfs will hit tank Maokai and he seems balanced at the moment, so we're compensation buffing Bramble Smash.
Base armor increased. W mana cost decreased.
Orianna is still stuck as an understudy after her last round of buffs where we didn’t quite go far enough to make the buff meaningfully impactful. We’re giving her a teeny bit more power in hopes that the ballerina can finally, once again, take her shot at the main stage.
Passive bonus AD scaling adjusted, now deals 50% of bonus damage to towers, stack resource bar added.
Riven is intended to be a very high mastery champion and we don’t think her current state is supporting a type of play that allows her to masterfully snowball her leads into wins. We’re getting rid of her atypical passive scaling to make it more early-skewed and less spikey, while letting her passive do a little extra damage to towers so she can be a more powerful side lane threat.
Passive early movement speed reduced. R lifesteal effectiveness reduced.
Samira has been performing exceptionally well for several months now and her ban rate has skyrocketed. These changes are hopefully a win for everyone: those who are frustrated victims will be less frustrated and Samira mains will find she's still strong but actually available to pick! Everyone's happy!
Attack ratio increased. R damage increased, cooldown decreased.
Senna has fallen behind in terms of strength and popularity lately and, on top of that, her core items are receiving nerfs this patch. These buffs aim to compensate for those power losses and give her some power in the rest of her kit. We’re buffing R’s cooldown and damage to make it more relevant as an offensive tool post-durability patch, and buffing Senna's attack speed ratio to promote her build diversity through Kraken Slayer.
Q damage increased, cooldown decreased late. W cooldown adjusted, shield strength decreased. E damage increased.
Q>E>W is Thresh's most popular yet least powerful skill build order. It's currently optimal to max W early and Q late. E is cool. Thresh is at his best when he's throwing out hooks, navigating short range combat, and overall controlling the battlefield (as opposed to primarily throwing out enhanced shields to his allies). These AP ratio buffs are essentially scaling damage buffs because he gets 1 AP per soul and these are here to give him some more choice in considering light AP itemization and runes.
Health growth decreased, base armor decreased. Q On-hit damage decreased. R increased slow decreased.
Since Udyr's VGU, we've spent quite a few patches working on the power balance between each of his stance maxes as well as his overall power. As a result, his winrates for different stances have fluctuated greatly, but his overall winrate has been relatively stable. Now that we're more happy about how each stance expresses power (Wilding Claw for AS/AD heavy DPS builds and Wingborne Storm for utility), we're taking a bigger swing at Udyr's total power level, which has been a cut above other junglers since Preseason.
Q range increased. W range increased.
Veigar is a bit short on the winrate. While buffing his damage could definitely return him to his former glory, we want to avoid situations where Veigar outplays his opponents with a masterful Q+R display of skill. Instead, we're giving the immobile mage a bit more leeway when farming and poking around dangerous enemies. He'll still have to risk himself for big Event Horizons or Primordial Burst, but this should give him some nice breathing room in other situations.
Q passive damage can now critically strike. R AD scaling increased.
We’re buffing Viego because he’s the king. On a more serious note, Viego’s been struggling to find more than just love recently with his declining solo queue and pro strength. Now that he’s in a weaker spot, we’re comfortable giving him some measured buffs to bring his power levels up a little in a way that will reward higher risk/higher reward builds. Hail to the king, baby!
Demonic has been a strong contributor for enhanced clear speed times, especially on the likes of a few top tier picks like Maokai, Udyr, and Amumu. We’re now capping Demonic’s damage against monsters so it isn’t quite as effective
Doran's Shield is a very strong early game purchase for both tanks and fighters that makes a lot of champions feel less punishable than desired. This nerf aims to lower the passive healing without discouraging interaction based healing.
Since the Durability Update, ranged supports have reigned supreme and melee supports have had to rely much more on finding early lane kills. Our goal with these changes is to even out the power of the two classes (alongside the champion specific buffs from 13.3) by more closely syncing the time supports get their ward upgrades and improving the balance of health regeneration and spell spamming in lane.
Pro players are sometimes going Magical Footwear and selling the boots when they get them to use the gold to accelerate their mythic item purchases. This circumvents the original intent of the item (to grant you boots) so we want to bring down the power level of this particular strategy.
Treasure Hunter is far and away one of the best runes to pick up in your secondary rune tree for almost all champions. It is currently contributing to a lot of early snowballing, so we’re taking away some of the gold that helped it become a top-tier rune.
Shelly's range is fairly prohibitive for moving her into positions outside of the baron pit that you can use to your advantage. We're removing her soft reset state where when patience ends and she runs back and can be picked up by the enemy team, so now on contested Shelly’s you can disengage and not lose your objective instantly to the enemy team.
Lord Gromp is currently so durable that he's very hard to counter jungle and his time tax on full clears is too high. We’re pulling down his durability a tad (which will scale his late game durability by even more).
Early sustain in the jungle could use a helping hand, so we’re bringing it up just a tad. Remember, this is multiplied by up to x2.25 based on missing HP (which will happen many times in a clear).
AP Junglers have a very generous ratio on their companion’s damage and now that the meta is dominated by these champions it seems that ratio is a bit too generous. Demonic Embrace after the changes to jungle HP scaling in preseason made it THE preeminent jungle clear item and put a lot of pressure on tank/bruiser junglers to purchase the item to clear effectively. It should still be a powerful spike for clearing and killing but shouldn't be quite so overbearing in the PvE aspects of the jungle compared to other options and builds.
Early game League of Legends has become very snowbally. We're paring down early leads from kills so that when someone gets ahead early into a game they don't get so far ahead so fast.
Especially in the jungle, kills could quickly swing players back into parity with opponents who are substantially ahead from other actions. Comeback mechanics in League are built to get you within a fighting chance of the opponent, but the comeback system on kills brought you up to their level. This shouldn't be a major shift to leveling in league but it should mean level leads are a little bit stickier.
All ARAM Death Timers have been reverted to their 12.22 values.
The first Clash tournament of the year is coming up next month! Here’s a look at the upcoming Bilgewater Cup dates:
Party chat is a new chat channel that allows you to chat just to your pre-made party members. Chat channels indicate who will see the messages you send, which was previously limited to team and all chat. The chat console will now show the chat channels receiving your messages to the left of your chat bar. You can toggle between the different channels with commands or the [tab] key, and change which channels are active for you in your settings. For quick access to party chat you can use the /party, /pt, or /p commands. Incoming Party chat messages will be indicated with [Party] before the message. Party chat will be the default chat setting for new players.
New commands for /muteself and /deafen are available in-game. We have seen players use the automatic chat abuse detection and muting feature in order to mute themselves, which is a misuse of that system. Given players do want to use this functionality, we are providing ways for players to mute themselves without needing to use inappropriate language to do so.
In the 13.1 Patch Notes we mentioned that Refund Tokens would be deprecated due to internal technical challenges with supporting an older refund system. However, after some reassessment of the situation and a focused effort from our teams over the last several weeks, we’ve identified a path forward to maintain the refund token system that has been present prior to this year. We apologize for the mixed messaging, but ultimately want to thank you for your feedback on this. We also won't be backtracking on the 3 refund tokens that we granted to each player at the beginning of the season.
As a quick refresher on the system: Players will accumulate one (1) refund token each year up to a max total of three (3) tokens per account. The same eligibility rules will apply and can be found in more detail on the support website.
With the preservation of this system, this means the next token refresh will occur at the start of Season 14.
Ranked progression at the beginning of a season starts out strong, but as it progresses it can become more difficult to see movement in your rank. We want to make it easier to move both up and down in rank so that your ranked journey is more eventful overall. Right now moving your rank can feel like pushing a boulder up a hill, so our goal is that if you have a solid session you’ll get to see your rank increase. Ranked hasn’t had large changes in a while now, so as usual, we’re open to your feedback and may make further changes down the road. If you want to learn more about the relationship between MMR and rank, check out this player support article.
A duo in a match has more of an advantage over the solo players in their match than they should right now, so we’re making a change which should result in them being put in games with higher skilled players on both sides. We’ll continue to monitor and may nudge this value over the next few patches.
The following skins will be released in this patch:
The following chromas will be released this patch: