Welcome to the 2024 Season! Split 1 kickoff is quickly approaching, so make sure to read up on all the changes coming in 14.1 to get ready. THIS IS THE YEAR WE HIT OUR RANKED GOALS!
This year we’re starting off strong with a big gameplay update! We’ve got Voidgrubs, Voidmites, Voidborn Monsters, three Baron Nashor forms each with their own Baron Pit, map changes to every lane and jungle, over 100 item changes (including new items), a Hwei buff, dynamic music, new in-game quests, FIST BUMPS, and a lot more!
Ya like Jazz? Check out the TFT patch notes here!
Welcome to the 2024 Ranked Season! We’re going to be kicking off the first split of the year in this patch with ranked queues opening on January 10th. For those that missed the ranked queues closing details in the last patch notes you can read those here.
Season 2024 Split 1 starts at 12:00:00 January 10, 2024 according to regional local time everywhere except for LA1 and NA1:
Region | Time Zone | Season Start Local Time |
---|---|---|
OC1 | Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
JP1 | Japan Standard Time (JST) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
KR1 | Korea Standard Time (KST) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
RU | Moscow Standard Time (MSK) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
EUN1 | Central European Time (CET) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
TR1 | Time zone in Istanbul, Turkey (TRT) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
EUW1 | Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
BR1 | Time zone in São Paulo, Brazil (BRT) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
LA2 | Time zone in Buenos Aires, Argentina (ART) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
LA1 | Central Standard Time (CST) | Jan/10/2024 9:00:00 |
NA1 | Pacific Standard Time (PST) | Jan/10/2024 7:00:00 |
PH | Philippine Standard Time | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
VN | Indochina Time (GMT+7) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
SG | Singapore Standard Time (GMT+8) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
TH | Indochina Time (GMT+7) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
TW | Taipei Standard Time (GMT+8) | Jan/10/2024 12:00:00 |
The season transition experience will be similar to what we had in the past: Ranked queues will be disabled for a couple of hours, and will be brought back as soon as 14.1 is up, and a couple of hours after that, Split 1 will be officially launched! The ranked games played during the downtime won't count towards your new season progression.
Shard transfers will be disabled before season end, and re-enabled after all end of season rewards are granted.
For those who earned it, Victorious Tryndamere will be the reward for the 2023 Split 2 season! We mentioned it in one of our recent Dev Updates but this skin will be a little delayed so you should expect him to appear on your accounts in a few patches. We wanted to make sure we had a unique skin for each split so we opted to take some time to ensure those that participated in split 2 received a different reward than split 1. We’ll add it to the notes on the patch that should happen as well, right now we’re targeting patch 14.4, and we’ll update you if anything changes there.
As for the remaining rewards (of which you can see the details on our Ranked Rewards support article) those should be delivered onto your accounts in 14.2 and we’ve validated the results.
In case you missed this one as well, we released a dev blog late last year to offer players a helping hand when it comes to learning about the Void changes coming this patch, /dev: Cat Cults, Rift Mechs, and Baron’s Revamp here! If you’re interested in how we refined these changes OR if the idea of seeing 11 adorable cats combining their forces to seal Rift Herald appeals to you, give it a read!
Disclaimer: Void Event not included
We’ve got some brand new residents moving into the Baron pit this season: the Voidgrubs and Voidmites. These Voidborn beasties are a new horde objective that will be taking the place of the first Rift Herald each game. Our goal with Voidgrubs was to provide tower pushing pressure in contrast to dragon buff's ramping threat, but spread it out more evenly across all lanes. We also wanted to give players gradual, persistent power throughout the entire game, as opposed to the old Shelly whose power was more instant and would sometimes simply end the laning phase. In addition, its multiple spawn nature means that mid or top laners who have pushed out their lane can sneak one without needing to commit the full time it would take to clear an entire epic objective. But let’s jump into the details!
Rift Herald is back and they have a brand new, Voidgrub-inspired look! But this isn’t just a surface level change, because Herald also has some changes under the hood… err, shell?
Rift Herald (Note: Unchanged)
Once Baron Nashor emerges onto the Rift at 20 minutes, the next time Blue Sentinel and Red Brambleback respawn they will rise again as Voidborn Sentinel and Voidborn Brambleback respectively with 30% more health. This transformation also comes with increased durability making them harder to take down, but fret not because this extra effort is worth it! Now, once slain, Blue and Red will grant their buffs to the entire team of the player that takes them down (excluding any allies that were dead).
Speaking of Blue and Red, their respective buffs are also getting some changes! (Note: These adjustments apply to both the base Sentinel and Brambleback as well as their Voidborn counterparts.
But we also have a non-void related update for our favorite Sentinel and Brambleback! Introducing Draconic Sentinel and Brambleback, these versions appear once the Elemental Rift is locked in as the 2nd drake is slain. Unlike their Voidborn counterparts though, no respawn is required for the buff to become Draconic!
Similarly, after 20 minutes once Rift Scuttler rises again after being slain, she will be Voidborn Scuttler. When slain, Voidborn Scuttler will send out a massive Scryer’s Bloom effect, revealing all champions and wards in a large surrounding area. Similar to Scryer’s, all wards revealed this way will be reduced to 1 HP.
Would it really be a set of Void-related changes without Baron Nashor himself? It’s been quite a while since Baron last received a visual update, let alone one with three new, terrifying forms! Introducing them from left to right, we have the All-Seeing Baron, Hunting Baron, and finally the Territorial Baron.
The Baron dance is one as old as time, but over the years, the Baron fight has gotten somewhat stale with players hyper optimizing every aspect of it. It's also not aged well as our premier epic monster, the kind of monster that makes you say “Wow that’s an epic monster.” Our goal here is to update Baron's visuals while freshening up his fight a bit using new terrain and spells so that it takes a bit of new mastery and adaptability game to game.
Each form of Baron Nashor will have a unique move at their disposal, so make sure to prepare accordingly!
Baron Nashor
Fighting around Baron has been essentially unchanged since Baron got his last VGU, so we thought it was time to add a little bit more interest to his fight game to game. While Baron is still a fun and interesting objective to have on the map, over time players have effectively “solved” how to take him down. And where’s the fun in that? This should help shake things up between games so now each game you’ll be challenged to think about exactly how you can take advantage of each Baron pit.
Hunting Baron Pit
This is the baseline Baron pit, but why fix what isn’t broken? His new spell in this pit punishes grouped up enemies so make sure to distance properly.
Territorial Baron Pit
A rifft on the baseline pit, it's easier to disengage from enemies in this variation, but flanks are also faster. His new spell in this pit can punish heavy grouping to disincentivize grouping on a single side.
All-Seeing Baron Pit
This is the most different from the pit of today, it's much riskier to access Baron from the river in this variation with new strong flank and flee angles. His new spell in this pit goes far and controls zones locking up some of the free new space that he’s made here.
In case you missed it we released a dev blog late last year digging into these terrain changes, /Dev: Season 2024 Map Changes here! We recommend checking out the entire thing if you’re curious about how we landed on these changes.
We’ve got a few different goals with the map changes this season. At the highest level, our goal is to make lanes more fair across sides. Red and blue sides have very different advantages in a lane with respect to how to gank them, how fights play out, how you can posture against the brush or river, etc. These differences will still exist, but in lesser ways. For example, top lane red side won’t feel nearly so exposed when pushing up, so you don’t need to be a safer laner to exist when the champ select gods put you red side.
The second goal of the map changes was specifically around making solo lanes a bit more protected from junglers, or roamers generally. Ganking as a primary early game output was just too strong in most cases. Each lane had a slightly different reason for their changes however. Let’s take a quick dive into those now!
Top lane is in a constant push and pull between players wanting more influence and output over the rest of the map in the lane, and also being substantially less influenced by the other roles, especially early on. For most players, the lane simultaneously feels entirely at the mercy of your jungler (or roaming support in higher skill levels) and also unable to do anything to win the game except with major leads.
With these changes we’re substantially reducing the ability for other lanes to affect top in the early game, letting the 1v1 fight really shine. It’s not like the jungler won’t be able to gank at all, so still watch out. We’re also shifting top brush into a pixel in the center of the river so it’s less side-skewed and substantially more powerful when contested. It tends to be correct to ward outside of the river brush on live in many cases and while this still remains true to an extent, this brush is closer to an optimal warding position and is less potent for ganking than before.
Also, an extension of the jungler influence on top lane was early Rift Herald. More often than not, Rift Herald was dropped in top lane (it’s closest to her lair after all), and she absolutely destroys any laning phase that might exist. What’s a tower to a crab god? Shelly regularly invalidated laning phases by destroying towers and adding giant influxes of gold to a specific laner, usually entirely at the jungler’s whim. We’ve seen that quite often both top laners are dissatisfied with lanes breaking apart this early—the behind player being put into the dumpster, and the ahead player not having any more time to play with their lead. By pushing back Rift Herald, we’re intending to substantially reduce the volatility of the late laning phase top lane experience. Dovetailing off the objective space, one of our goals with the new Voidgrubs objective is that top laners will have a lot more agency in affecting the outcome of the early top side objective than before. We’re also making the top side objective more potent for team-wide success than previously so that their early leads can matter more for the team. We’ll go more into the Voidgrubs down below, but overall we’re aiming to give top laners a lane more protected from outside influence while making their lane more important for the team’s overall chances of victory.
Mid lane was a similar set of changes for some slightly different goals. It is the lane (on live) with by far the most access for ganking, and one thing we’ve noticed is that over the years players have learned just how unsafe the lane is for a lot of our more immobile champions without great self-peel. The Zyras and Brands and Karthuses of League have felt like the midlane was no longer able to be their home as more and more high-agency characters appeared and junglers learned just how easy it was to punish these immobile mages.
Our main goal here was to make mid substantially safer for this class of characters at a fundamental level. Opening up midlane to be mage-forward should give us a real role for this class again. The goal is not at all to push assassins out of this lane, just make it more hospitable for immobile characters with respect to their ability to face junglers. They’re still definitely gankable, but should be a bit less so than they are currently.
The other main change for mid was to open up roam paths that are a little bit safer. Each side will have a path players can roam along that requires putting themselves at substantially less risk to get to river or even the respective lane they’re roaming to. We’re pushing out the mid lane brush for the same reasons. Providing mid laners with about 20% more time after seeing an enemy before they can get into actionable range should give substantially less power to early ganks and much more safety to these immobile characters.
Mid lane, at its core, is a lane that requires some amount of roaming to support junglers or side lanes. And in the current state of League, the mid laners who don’t have the agency to safely roam feel invalidated by the role. Altogether our goal here is to lower the requirements to a functional mid laner across champions so that we can support a wider roster of champions there, particularly immobile mages and their like. We are definitely not trying to push champions out of the role though and will definitely be balancing to follow up here, especially since there are surely a number of high-agency mages who will benefit a lot and be overbearing at the start.
Bot lane is getting a smaller set of changes visually, but we definitely still expect them to be quite impactful overall. Just like top lane, we’re adding parity across sides so that entrances to lane and brush positions are matched roughly equally across sides.
These changes open up a new gank pathway through bottom red jungle and are among our riskiest changes to the map. We’re reducing gank potency elsewhere while nominally increasing it bot lane, so we’ll be watching this portion of the map very closely to ensure that it’s still reasonable and enjoyable. Red side bot lane is now particularly more vulnerable than before (as opposed to blue side) because it doesn’t have the extra distance created from Dragon pit walls to give more time for responding to action on vision or even just to slightly delay movement from river.
This new gank pathway also doesn’t allow for as easy contesting of vision in its tri brush because of the relatively easier access from river. It’s a difficult spot on the map for us to balance and one we’ll look at closely. The center of river brush should also be more of a focal point to contest as compared to before as it has deeper river control than the old brush and is less side-skewed.
This brush should be substantially worse for ganking red-side bot lane when unwarded, however. On live, the river brush gives near unfettered access to lane and this power is brought down to mitigate the concerns around gankability of red-side bot lane. Notably, this brush does cover access to the red tri brush from river to protect your bot lane from all but the deepest wraparound ganks.
Finally, we adjusted the geometry in the jungle to support these lane adjustments and add a lot of new interest to Dragon and Baron fights. Access to these epic monster fights on live is relatively easy through a major choke point opposite the monster, or minor chokepoints deeper into river or the jungle further out.
The latest adjustments aim to shift away from a single choke point and focus combat around multiple entries, as well as generally overhaul how these fights play out as this space is quite solved and players are very used to this macro. Contesting should be a little bit more equal across sides as it currently tends to advantage the team who can comfortably engage and escape from an objective.
These adjustments as noted above also do help roaming quite a bit as there’s a safe secondary path for both teams that doesn’t involve any jungle movement. All in all, our goal is that junglers should have a harder time ganking, especially early, but shouldn’t feel like they have no more agency over the game.
Given the terrain changes we’ve introduced in 14.1, we also need to adjust some Drakes so that they’ll play nicely with all of the new walls (or lack thereof). This includes moving a few small walls and brushes for Mountain and Ocean Drake.
However, after we spent so much time building walls across the rift we took a step back to look at Infernal’s map changes again, which led to the following changes:
We wanted to experiment with these changes after considering player feedback about the Infernal Rift being the least interesting in terms of gameplay. Our goal is that this will help us create more interesting map states beyond just terrain changes like the current Hextech and Chemtech. That said, we’ll keep a close eye on how these changes land and how players like them.
Base armor increased.
As players are still learning Hwei, we’re giving him a small bump up in power, primarily for the sake of Hwei’s teammates, who are on the receiving end of a fairly low win rate. Long term, we think Hwei is probably in a very good spot or maybe a little too powerful but we’re tuning him for January, not June. We’ll continue to monitor his performance and make adjustments as needed.
With the Summoner's Rift map update making ganking generally more difficult, we want to make sure that champions who relied on ganking now have a strong fallback pattern of farming jungle camps. We're adjusting the damage contribution of jungle pets in order to close the gap between very fast clears like Graves or Karthus and slower clears like... pretty much every tank. The percent bonus damage from pets does not work on epic monsters, so a new cap has been added against epic monsters that roughly matches last patch's DPS tuning, since pet DPS is increasing otherwise.
As with all changes like this, it's hard to get a perfect read on every single possible jungler, plus the rest of the patch will certainly shake up champion power levels as well. We'll make sure to revisit these numbers if clears feel bad, but these changes should overall be a buff to mid-game clears for all the champions who were otherwise too slow to participate.
As of patch 14.1 we are officially retiring Mythic items from League. If you’re curious about why we’re removing Mythic items, I’d recommend checking out this Quick Gameplay Thoughts here or if you’re more interested in some of the thinking and goals behind the updated item system you can check out one of our recent dev blogs, /Dev: 2024 Item Changes here!
To summarize, our main goal with this update is to reduce the power of items that were previously Mythic by converting them to Legendary which, while making ex-Mythic items less powerful, will allow for each champion’s unique gameplay to shine. Additionally, we want to ensure that each class is properly supported (like having Assassins items be early game skewed or giving mages better gold scaling) and to make each spell cast feel more important to players by lowering the overall amount of Haste items give.
We’ve got a lot of item descriptions to cover below, so see you on the other side! (Note: All Mythic item passives have been removed.)
The following items have been removed: Crown of the Shattered Queen, Everfrost, Leeching Leer, Demonic Embrace, and Stopwatch/Perfectly Timed Stopwatch
The following items have been removed: Goredrinker, Divine Sunderer, Silvermere Dawn, and Ironspike Whip
The following items have been removed: Turbo Chemtank, Radiant Virtue, Gargoyle’s Stoneplate, Aegis of the Legion, Evenshroud, Radiant Virtue, and Lifewell Pendant
In previous Seasons AD Assassins tended to purchase one or two Lethality items before pivoting into other options in the AD system, particularly fighter items. We believe Assassins are at their best when they're highly lethal but highly fragile anti-carry, and when they have fighter builds they tend to not be satisfying their own fantasies on top of being more frustrating and harder to deal with for enemies.
Our goals with these changes are to remove some of the more potent defensive tools assassins were accessing (like Duskblade or Eclipse) and open them up to stronger snowballing through the Assassin system with the lethality purchases. We've also removed their ability to stack Black Cleaver and Last Whisper items so that Assassins don't end up as premium killers of bruisers and reasonably effective against tanks as we believe armor should be an effective purchase into Assassins.
The following items have been removed: Rageknife and Galeforce
With the 2024 season, we saw a great opportunity to transform the Support Quest Item system. The old support items didn't bring a lot of customization or flavor to your builds. And despite being objectively powerful, they weren’t satisfying as some champions or play styles were underserved. Enter a universal support item that branches into five. Now, with the choice of five distinct passives to choose from, support items will be able to cover a broader range of champions and playstyles. Additionally, these changes should also help your upgrade moment feel more engaging and powerful.
These upgrades were designed to be powerful, as they’re typically acquired around the time you finish your first item. This one and a half item power spike was actually designed to create a period of time within the early to mid game where supports can have their biggest power spikes and influence the game most meaningfully. Going forward, this will allow us to better define when supports have satisfying power in the game and, ultimately, help inform how we’re balancing that power.
The following items have been removed: Relic Shield, Targon’s Buckler, Steel Shoulderguards, Runesteel Spaulders, Spellthief’s Edge, Frostfang, Spectral Sickle, and Harrowing Crescent.
The following items have been removed: Chemtech Putrifier and Chalice of Harmony.
The Perfect Timing Rune has been removed and replaced with Triple Tonic.
Towers have been on the more fragile end for a while now, but with the addition of more tower damage coming from Voidgrubs, we thought it was time to give them a bit more durability. We want towers to feel like something that you can actually protect and reduce how easy it is for some teams to immediately win by blasting through three towers. We're also adjusting the backdoor bonus (reduced damage to towers when there are no nearby allied minions) to be more potent as it was often being ignored by champions later into the game. Now it will also apply to true damage rather than entirely nullifying it so that it's consistent across damage types.
Alongside the launch of the new season we’ll also be making some behind-the-scenes changes that should help improve the overall ranked experience.
Fist bumps. That’s right, Riot Games (whose logo is a fist bump) added an interactive fist bump into League of Legends for you to celebrate all the hype moments in game. All you need to do is activate the emote, wait for another team member to use the emote and then BOOM. Fist bump achieved. Queue the fireworks. (Note: the default keybind for this is [U])
The fist bump emote will only be visible to allied teammates and, in the incredibly embarrassing event that a teammate does not fist bump you back, your fist bump can transform into a thumbs up.
It’s been nearly 10 years since the last update of music for Summoner’s Rift (way back in 2015). And while we already have a music system that’s working, we wanted to find a way to level it up even more! With the addition of all of the new and updated Void creatures coming this season, we felt like there was a real opportunity to use music to enhance the feeling of taking these objectives. Cue Dynamic Music!
This new Dynamic Music system can be broken down into 3 components:
We’re introducing musical “zones” into Summoner’s Rift. In other words, we play different music for different locations within the map as you enter them. Right now, it’s only the top side river (including the Baron pit) that has unique music, but make sure to go check it out!
Some of you might know that Summoner’s Rift’s base music evolves over time with the state of the game. The music gradually gets more complex and exciting as towers and inhibitors get taken down. So when we zone out the top side river, we also want it to have its own evolution within the zone as well.
Music will evolve as new objectives spawn with there being a total of 4 evolution states:
Each of the monsters introduce their different personalities and stakes to the river—so naturally they each get their own unique music as well!
What if there was a way the music could react to what you, the player, are doing? The first place that feels like a natural tie-in is the idea of “raid boss music,”so why not add some music for these void objectives when you’re fighting them? This resulted in three unique pieces of music for when you are fighting Grubbies, Rift Herald, and Baron.
We hope that these changes make the map feel more alive and make each little corner of the map feel lived in and more interesting. We’re very excited for the launch of Dynamic Music for Summoner’s Rift and to see how you all like it!
From champions with sunglasses taking 1 less damage from Leona’s passive, to Rift Herald dance parties, hidden surprises are no stranger to League. In this patch, we’re introducing some additional in-game quests for a few champions to help bring their vibrant stories and personalities to life on the Rift! Read below for information on the quests, how to activate them, and the rewards you’ll get if you're able to win!
Due to the large amount of changes coming in this patch we won’t be making any changes to ARAM in 14.1, but we will be closely monitoring champion performance with the update and plan to implement follow up balance changes in the upcoming patch.
Due to the start of the new Ranked 2024 Season, Split 1 career stats will be reset.
Seasonal Challenges are going to be released alongside each ranked split in the 2024 season! There will be three sets of Challenges, each with a new unique title earnable at the Master rank. The Split 1 title will be Voidborn and the new Challenges are as follows:
What better way to ring in the new season than watching your friends start their climbs? In this patch we’re introducing a few changes to League’s spectator system to help modernize it for players. Fun fact, the 3 minute spectator delay was originally tied to ward timers, which are now 2 minutes 30 seconds. Can you guess what the new delay is? Anyway, now you’ll be able to spectate with 30 seconds less delay on Summoner’s Rift games and YOU CAN NOW SPECTATE ARENA AND TFT GAMES.
In order to kick 2024 off right we’re sharing out the next several rotations for the Mythic Shop! Our goal here is to help you all plan out Mythic Essence acquisition and spending, so we’ll start out with a rolling list of approximately the next 3 months. This will include both the previously released Prestige and Mythic (aka Hextech) skins, but we’ll be leaving new Prestige skins and Seasonal Mythic skin reveals as their own surprise. As we near the end of the list, we’ll refresh it with the next three months of rotations unless we find that a different cadence is working better for the community.
The current rotation schedule continues on with the next rotation in patch 14.2. Starting from there, these are the upcoming skins in the next few patches:
Coming in Patch 14.2
Coming in Patch 14.4
Coming in Patch 14.6
QoL Changes
Bugfixes
Cosmetic Bugfixes
The following skins will be released in this patch:
The following chromas will be released this patch: