Plug in and get ready to game, it's time for Patch 14.5!
In this week's patch we're taking a beat to make follow up changes on some adjustments from previous patches like Seraphine, Rek'Sai, and Smolder while addressing a handful of champions that are currently overperforming. Additionally, we're continuing tuning on some support items to adjust their power curves and create more parity between them and opening up itemization options for AP assassins.
In other news we also have the Season 2024 Split 1 ranked end date and times, a round of ARAM balance changes, and some new additions to the PROJECT skinline!
Wrong patch notes? In that case, you can check out the TFT patch notes here!
Now that we're two months into Season 2024 Split 1 we wanted to take a moment to share the Split 1 end date so players with ambitious ranked goals (or those that have been procrastinating their climbs like me) can plan ahead!
E damage reduction decreased. Bugfix to passive that gave Bel'Veth too many stacks from Epic Void monsters.
Bel'Veth is currently the Empress of the Void and dueling in the early game. The damage reduction coming from her E is a key contributor to this, so we're bringing it down a notch while also addressing some grub bugs that were working in her favor.
Passive damage to monsters increased. R damage decreased, cooldown increased.
While we feel Brand's power level is appropriate in the jungle, he's far too dominant in mid and support in Platinum and below. As such, we'll be reducing his explosive burst damage, which is disproportionately more powerful in these skill brackets.
Q damage decreased.
Evelynn has been dominating the top skill brackets of solo queue for a while now, so we're taking a swing at how quickly she can snowball with a gold (and Dark Seal stack) lead.
Armor growth increased. Q cooldown decreased.
After the changes to Spear of Shojin earlier this year, Jarvan no longer has to be tuned around excessively high ability haste. Since he's currently in need of a little extra power, we're reverting some changes we originally made when Shojin was much more powerful on him.
Passive Darkin healing increased. R Darkin healing increased.
Red Kayn is currently feeling pretty blue. After losing access to Goredrinker and nerfs to his passive, he no longer feels like he's able to drain-tank fights and thus has to build lethality to do slightly better than if he were to build fighter items… which admittedly still isn't great. We'd like to raise the power level of Darkin Kayn while also nudging that performance toward fighter items, so we're opting to increase his self-healing which synergizes better with his fighter builds.
Passive bonus movement speed increased. Q cast time adjusted. E slow increased. R damage increased.
Kog'Maw is a sad Void puppy who's very reliant on just his W. We're looking to reinforce that Kog'maw feels like his whole kit is useful and feels good for his primary playstyle. These changes include letting him weave Q into his pattern a bit more (this also might make Trinity a bit better which is a cool option for him, but not the goal here). We're also making E a spell worth casting, as currently a number of Kog'Maws (Kog'Mi?) don't even put points into E. Finally, we're making Kog'maw's passive a bit more reliable and buffing his R up in AD builds.
Base movement speed decreased. Q bonus damage to monsters increased. W cooldown increased.
Maokai is still performing far better than he needs to at support, although some of that is due to Solstice Sleigh being overpowered. We believe that a mix of Solstice getting nerfed this patch and some direct changes should get Maokai support into an appropriate state. But even if we're nerfing him as a support, we want to maintain his viability as a jungler, so we'll be hastening his first clear which has become pretty slow after the recent nerfs to his Q and E.
Base movement speed decreased. Cougar Q bonus damage to hunted targets decreased.
Nidalee is in a pretty stable place right now, but that's only if you look at Emerald and below. In high Diamond and above she's at Apex predator levels of powerful. In order to keep her in a good state for the majority of players, we're hitting her with some high skill skewed nerfs, namely her base mobility and Q follow up damage.
Various QoL updates and bugfixes. E damage and monster cap increased. R damage increased.
Rek'Sai's kit update has done a lot for raising interest (her play rate initially doubled) but she landed weaker than we hoped, so we're coming in with a large array of buffs. Most notably, her attack animations are being sped up and we're returning the un-cancelable Queen's Wrath attack, which was temporarily removed to prevent another bug that has since been fixed. Additionally, we're buffing her strongest E and R to help them have a satisfying amount of damage.
Q damage decreased.
Senna is quite powerful at the moment, dominating as a conventional bot laner in Solo queue and as a support in Pro play. In order to bring her down a notch we're taking off a chunk of her Q AD scaling which should bring down her damage while preserving her utility outputs.
All abilities adjusted.
The vast majority of Seraphine's player base is in support, where she's currently critically weak. Typically, we'd just buff her, but she's also significantly overpowered as a bot lane AP carry, which means simpler tactics aren't available. So we're trying again to close the gap between these two roles while being mindful of what players find fun about her in each play style.
For APC Seraphine, we're playing up her repeated damage. Q's missile speed and execute damage against champions has gone up and E is now worthy of maxing over W with a better AP ratio to boot. As compensation, she's losing a lot of power against minions and a bit of top-end ultimate power.
For support Seraphine, we're embracing her various builds. There's a logical case for every conceivable skill order and we're trying to make those choices viable based upon what game you're facing: Want to be primarily about shielding? It should be equally viable to max Q or E instead. Want to cosplay as a full mage and just deal as much damage as possible? Go right ahead, we think that option should also be supported.
We're also delivering some small support-skewed changes like shifting her mana toward regeneration, which synergizes with the support item, plus some base move speed, which is more important to a more roam-centric role.
Base armor increased.
Sivir has been weak for a while, and while examining where we could give her some power, we noticed that with such a short attack range, it's hard for her to have an interactive laning phase. As such we're bringing her up to a much higher base armor value to let her trade and scrap in lane more effectively.
Q damage adjusted. E bolt quantity adjusted. R damage decreased, sweet spot damage increased, self heal increased.
Smolder is currently in a healthy spot and we’re generally happy with how he’s landed on the Rift. In this patch we’re making some adjustments to how he scales and interacts with the item system to disincentivize tankier builds and to put even more emphasis on his stacking and late game dragon fantasy. We also want proactive E casts to matter more for all builds, not just crit ones. Finally, R’s sweet spot mechanic is a little underemphasized so we’re aiming to make it matter more!
E bonus attack speed and damage decreased.
Twisted Fate's continuing to soar up the ban rate charts while being a top performer, even with the recent nerfs. Ultimately, we want to ensure AP Twisted Fate is the stronger way to play him while also getting AD Twisted Fate into the “viable” category of champion builds. But at the end of the day we don't want AD TF to be stronger than other champions in their respective roles.
Passive bonus movement speed decreased. Q cooldown increased early.
The Vayne changes from 13.6 did a lot to give her a fighting chance in early trades in lane, but at this point it's become clear that Vayne is just far too strong, especially as a top laner. We'd like to preserve Tumble as a satisfying button to press in the early game as it gives her a fighting chance against other ranged champions, but don't want her choking out and running down her melee competition in top lane.
Q damage increased. R cooldown decreased.
Season 14 nerfed Rabadon’s Deathcap’s AP multiplier, and we’ve generally lowered the AP ratios on items, which haven’t been the kindest to Veigar. Despite our efforts in Patch 14.2 he’s still coming up a bit short compared to where we’d like him to be in terms of power. In this patch we’ll be giving him a small buff to his Q to help it hit a little harder and easier to stack with, while also giving him a bit more threat with his ultimate in the earlier stages of the game.
Passive damage increased. E and passive interaction adjusted.
Vex doesn’t quite have the damage she needs to chain together multikills like she could last season, so we’re amping her damage when played as an anti-mobility mage.
Passive maximum stack decreased, percent amplification per stack increased, stack falloff rate adjusted.
Wukong isn't performing quite as well as we'd like him to in the top lane, and his current state has him a bit too late game skewed, so we're making some changes to his passive this patch to make him a bit more powerful in the early game. As it is today, his passive regularly hits max stacks as a jungler when he's fighting camps, but struggles to get value against champions in lane. These changes should help him get more out of his passive in lane while also slightly helping his jungle performance.
E bonus damage to cursed enemies decreased. R Maiden armor and magic resist increased, no longer reduces AoE damage by 50%, bugfix to Evasion interaction.
In her current state, the Maiden of the Mist is currently too tanky against some champions while simultaneously being too squishy into others. Our goal with these changes is to make facing Maiden a more consistent experience for opponents that find themselves matched up against her while also lowering Yorick's overall power which is currently just a tad over the line.
W damage decreased.
Zac has been taking over top lane, but his power as a jungler is still in a relatively healthy spot. So we're aiming to give him some top lane specific nerfs. Since top lane Zac maxes W first while jungle Zac maxes E first, reducing the scaling per rank on his W should bring down his power up top while minimally affecting his jungle power (if not giving it a very small boost at rank 1 for early clearing).
While we're nerfing Solstice Sleigh this patch (more on that below), we want to also give Celestial Opposition a bit more power to help dethrone Sleigh's position as the premier tank support item as simply nerfing Sleigh wouldn't quite be enough to close the gap between the two. We're primarily targeting melee-specific outputs as we don't want it to become dominant on enchanters.
Following up on our work last patch, we're continuing to retune the support items to make their power spikes less immediate and, in exchange, making their scaling into the late game more powerful and we expect these changes to scaling to do just that. As a whole, we hope these changes will be slightly power positive on most enchanters.
Frozen Heart is currently the most built tank item in the game. For a niche item that is hyper focused on hampering one specific style of one damage type, that means the item is overperforming. This patch we're nerfing Frozen Heart's more generic strengths in order to preserve its usefulness as a specific counter as opposed to a generic tank item.
Heartsteel currently isn't worth purchasing on many champions, even those with respectable health ratios or easy access to the gameplay pattern this item is built to support. In this patch we'll be buffing the item's scaling while keeping the early game similar to let players live their best bonking fantasy. (Note: the tooltip in 14.5 will not reflect this change, but we're working on having it corrected in 14.6.)
Solstice Sleigh is currently sleighing as the best tank support upgrade option, outperforming Celestial Opposition by a large margin. In order to bring this item into line with other options we need to bring its power down.
Our goal with these Shojin changes is to make it synergize better with champions that should be primary users of the items, so these should help move it in the right direction for those champs. (Note: This change was implemented in Patch 14.4.)
Based on our reads back in Patch 14.1, Sunfire Aegis was over performing and required a tap down in power. However, now that the dust has settled, it's become apparent that these nerfs weren't necessary, so we're walking them back now.
A few of our AP assassin items are mistuned, leading to players in higher skill brackets to almost always buying the same items, regardless of which specific AP assassin they're playing. We're hoping to nudge up some level of choice by making these three items closer together in power level.
In this round of ARAM balance changes we're looking to inject some new life into tanks that we haven't touched for a while now that we have a better read on where they've landed within the new item system. We're also looking to make Camille and Naafiri a bit more approachable for players by giving them some additional Ability Haste and thus creating more opportunities for them to use their abilities within any given game.
On the nerfs side of things we're doing follow up work on some of the 14.4 changes geared towards Summoner's Rift gameplay that pushed some champions a bit over the line in ARAM. We're also giving Zac a small ARAM specific nerf this patch (in addition to the SR ones he's getting) while doubling down on Illaoi's healing as she's proven to be resilient to the changes last patch thanks to Sundered Sky and her E.
The following skins will be released in this patch:
As mentioned in the last patch notes, the Opulent event chromas for Porcelain Aurelion Sol, Darius, Graves, Morgana, Miss Fortune, and Irelia will be turned on in the event shop this patch so make sure you go check them out!
The following chromas will be released this patch: