Gather 'round cowboys and cowgirls, 'cause it's High Noon in patch 14.6!
This week, we've got ourselves a straightforward roundup. We're fixin' to boost the power of some scalin’ tanks that’re holdin' down the fort in the top lane like Cho'Gath and Sion. But we also gotta rein in them champions ridin' a bit too wild—lookin’ at you Smolder and Karma. And let me tell ya, we've got an update for Galio to make him live out his colossal tank midlaner dreams! When it comes to the gear, we're throwin' a buff lasso to give crit marksmen a bit more bite, and we're makin' a sweep through epic-tier items to make ‘em fairer.
Hold on to your saddles, 'cause there's more to the tale. We're wranglin' up some ARAM balance changes, tweakin' demotion LP levels, lettin' you know about a replay change behind the scenes, an update on DirectX support update, and unveilin' a fresh batch of High Noon skins for ya to feast your eyes on. So, saddle up partners and let the patchin' commence!
Also, make sure to keep an eye peeled for any suspicious stuff happenin’ in Quickplay towards the end of the month and let us know if y’all find anything interestin’.
Are ya hankerin’ for that new TFT Inkborn Fables set? Well be sure to mozy on down n’ check out the TFT patch notes here!
Crystalis Indomitus Kha'Zix, High Noon Evelynn, High Noon Gragas, High Noon Rell, High Noon Yone, Peacemaker High Noon Yone, and Prestige High Noon Evelynn will be available March 20, 2024 at 19:00 UTC.
One for All also returns this patch, so be sure to check it out and experience the fun chaos that can only happen when you lock in as five Yuumis! OFA will be going live on March 20, 2024 at 16:00 UTC for EUW, EUN, RU, and TR. All other Riot regions will have the mode turned on three hours later at 19:00 UTC.
Sometime in the next few patches, we will remove support and the ability to manually opt for DirectX 9 for League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics. To maintain the stability and performance of our games we need to deprecate support for older hardware or software that isn’t widely used by players anymore. If you’re still opted into using DirectX 9, the client will automatically turn off this option when we remove the support. However, if you were running it due to hardware reasons we recommend resolving that before we make this change so that you can continue playing when it’s removed.
Continuing on with our updates to the LP system, now that we’ve made promoting much easier we’re also adjusting the LP that players are set to once demoted. In its current state, demotions are a bit too forgiving, meaning some players are playing a rank above their actual skill level which results in negative LP gains. In order to help address this problem, we’ll be lowering the demotion LP starting point from 75 to 50 to help make those demotions more meaningful.
For more information on Placements, Promotions, and more check out our support page here.
Coming in this patch is our new Bot AI technology! Coming to Co-op versus AI: Intro, Beginner, and Intermediate queues, our new bots have picked up a few skills like jungling, taking objectives, ganking, and more. Our primary goal is that this new AI will provide newer players with a space to learn and grow while providing our experienced players with a lower-stress mode to enjoy. At the end of the day, we wanted to create an experience that feels much more like what you would see gameplay-wise in your normal games of Summoner’s Rift and we’re excited for our bots to do just that!
For more about the development of our new bot AI, check out the following dev blogs:.
Q can now jump to wards. W bonus attack speed decreased, healing decreased. R damage decreased.
Briar is currently struggling to find her footing in higher skill brackets of play while also overperforming in lower skill brackets. We’re introducing some skill level skewed nerfs and throwing a bone to Briar players who want to cosplay as Lee Sin.
W cooldown decreased. E damage increased.
Cho’Gath isn’t doing too hot up top, so we’re here to help this Void monstrosity become a bit more monstrous. We’re specifically targeting his early W cooldown and E damage in order to give him some better trading power and waveclear in lane.
Attack speed ratio increased, growth decreased. Passive bonus attack speed decreased, scaling adjusted, empowered bonus attack speed duration increased.
While Diana has been successful as an assassin in the mid lane this season, Jungle Diana has suffered due to her need to be an auto attacker. This patch, we're amping up her synergy with sustained combat builds without giving too much extra power to bursty ones.
Large adjustments to passive. Q damage decreased, cooldown decreased. W damage decreased, damage reduction adjusted. E damage decreased, damage to non champions increased.
In this patch, we’re making several adjustments to Galio with the goal of making his damage more consistent over fights and to increase his synergy with more durable AP items such as Rod of Ages and Riftmaker. The largest change we’re making is an increase to his Passive cadence throughout the game in order to require Galio to be in melee range for longer to access his full potential (this does however come at the cost of some damage). Since these changes incentivize Galio to use his passive more, we’d like to make it feel better to use by increasing his attack speed while it’s up.
The second largest change here is a new health ratio on his W, which should make purchasing AP and health items feel much better. The rest of the changes are focused on ensuring tank Galio doesn’t become too strong by toning down base damage while ensuring we keep the AP ratios high. Lastly, we’re including a buff to his E waveclear, as we expect these changes to hurt his waveclear due to the base damage nerf on his passive.
Base health decreased. Q mana cost increased.
Gragas is currently performing too well in solo queue, particularly in higher skill brackets, so we’ll be nerfing him there specifically. We’re doing this by reducing his base health, as it’s currently quite high, which should increase his early vulnerability and give his opponents more of a window to kill him, while also slightly reducing some of his passive power. We’re also including a nerf to his Q mana cost to reduce how frequently he can spam his Q before purchasing items.
Mana growth decreased, mana regeneration growth increased. Passive cooldown refund decreased. Q mana cost increased. R cooldown increased, E+R bonus shield increased.
Right now Karma is a reasonably powerful support but an oppressive mid laner who makes it difficult to do anything against her in the mid game. We want Mantra to be a button that she has to consider when to press and think of the best situations to use it. With Karma’s easy access to Ultimate Haste, that strategic choice has lost value as she’s casting Mantra too frequently. We have some nerfs to address this, but plan to offset these for support Karma by shifting her toward mana regen and including a buff to Defiance to preserve its current power level.
Darkin Q damage increased, Q animation now prevents use of item actives. Shadow Assassin R damage decreased.
Thanks to the last patch, fighter items now appear to be optimal on Rhaast. So mission accomplished there! That said, Kayn's two forms are still pretty far apart in power level, so we’re nerfing Shadow Assassin and buffing Darkin a bit more. We’re also specifically hitting his ability to activate items during his Q, as those items are meant to have their own cast times without being hidden inside of other spells.
E cooldown decreased.
Ornn is a little sad but isn’t quite as bad as some stats may lead you to believe, as experienced Ornn players are optimizing him by lowering their Searing Charge cooldown in the mid game by maxing it second. We’d like if E and Q max second were a little closer in power level, so we’re giving some of that E max power for free as an early game buff to everyone and a late game buff to players who continue to max Q second.
W bugfix. R QoL change and bugfix.
When we changed Burrow to always damage everyone inside the circle, we mistakenly removed its ability to always hit her auto-attack target, regardless of its actual range. We’re returning that functionality to this patch in addition to fixing another bug where her R could fail to cast in very specific scenarios.
Passive Mist Wraith drop rate decreased.
While we think Senna is appropriately powerful as a support in the hands of most players, she’s currently far too strong as a farming bot laner. While we targeted both her primary roles last patch, we’re specifically reducing the power of her bot lane carry performance this time.
Passive cooldown adjusted.
Shen is a unique tank with strong 1v1 dueling potential and we’d like to make sure he continues to live up to that standard. So this patch we’re amping up his mid-game selfish combat power by adjusting the scaling of his passive’s cooldown refund for better trading potential.
Q damage increased. W shield increased.
Once Sion lost his hard-binding to Heartsteel, he lost a lot of scaling, a lot of damage, and a lot of functional health, since the whole system fed back into itself. This patch, we’re attempting to bring Sion back to his scaling tank glory days, letting him truly shine in games where he’s performing well.
Q execute threshold decreased, conditions adjusted. W width decreased. E movement speed decreased.
Smolder is just a lil guy, but this lil guy’s dream of scaling with his stacks can feel like an inevitable nightmare for his opponents. While we don’t believe he’ll be problematic in the long term, there are quite a few frustrating or overpowered parts of his kit right now that we’re looking to address this patch. First, his execute scaling based on stacks has been too powerful, so we’re capping it at 6.5%. Second, the safety from his E and mismatched hitbox with his W visuals can be quite frustrating to go up against and help him scale more easily, so we’re nerfing them both with the goal of making Smolder’s early game weaknesses more noticeable for players that find themselves matched up against him.
Attack speed growth increased.
Tryndamere lost some power back in the patch 14.4 nerf to Lethal Tempo, so we'd like to give some back in a way that doesn't buff his level 1 all-in. In this patch, we’re giving him some more Attack Speed growth as compensation for his primary rune being nerfed, as he didn't deserve (nor have room for) the collateral damage there.
Q bonus movement speed decreased. R cooldown increased.
Volibear jungle is currently performing too well after our recent buffs and we’re back this patch to rein him in a bit. We’ll be walking back on some of the Q bonus movement speed and R cooldown buffs, but overall ensuring they’re still meaningfully stronger than before.
Crit marksmen as a whole feel pretty sad right now, so we’d like to power up the subclass as a whole. We’re doing this through their big-ticket multipliers and amping up their specific strengths as tank busters so that they strategically stand out from other marksmen who peak earlier in the game.
EARLY DORAN'S ITEMS FOR JUNGLERS AND SUPPORTS
In this patch we’re updating the rules around Doran’s Blade/Ring/Shield, World Atlas, Runic Compass, and the Jungle egg “Starter” items. Owning one Starter item listed here precludes you from buying the others. This means supports who start with a Doran’s Blade or Doran’s Ring will be unable to buy their support quests without first selling their Doran’s item and Junglers will be unable to buy an early Doran’s until they finish evolving their pet. We’re doing this to maintain Doran’s items as exclusive tools for laners as a way of giving them early agency over other roles (jungle and support) who aren't innately tied to being in lane and thus are more easily able to 2v1 or 3v1 their opponents. For more context, make sure to read about the support item changes below.
EARLY INCOME FOR SUPPORTS
Supports have gained a lot of power this season, specifically from their ability to hit two-item spikes (such as Zaz’Zak’s plus Liandry’s) very quickly. In this patch, we’re delaying their “second” item by lowering the amount of upfront gold that comes from their support items while still allowing their wards and quest completion to come in at the same time.
Additionally, we’re hitting PVP—specifically ranged PVP gold—slightly more than the other sources. These changes are meant to slightly weaken roaming as a method of quest completion and also bring ranged and melee users closer to quest completion parity, as ranged champions typically complete their quests 10-15 seconds faster than their melee counterparts.
We’re also delivering another direct nerf to Solstice Sleigh. Last patch we got its power level very close to where we wanted it but it needs one more small hit to get to an appropriate power level.
EPIC ITEMS
In this patch we’re taking a pass on Epic items with a couple goals in mind. First, we want to lower the number of times a lane can feel “over” due to one gank or single kill. The gold and experience difference will still be valuable, but the advantage doesn’t need to compound with overly strong early item spikes. We’re preserving the full power of Legendary items and making sure that you have to wait for those item spikes to really surge ahead of their opponents. Second, with piecemeal Epic items like Serrated Dirk being so easy to purchase, even when you had 1300 gold for an expensive component like B.F. Sword or Needlessly Large Rod, it was frequently incorrect to buy them. With those more expensive components being more difficult to buy, we believe that players should be rewarded when they’re able to make those big ticket component purchases.
Additionally, we’re doing some light cleanup on Glacial Buckler and Steel Sigil, whose build paths are now cleaner, and Spectre’s Cowl, whose completed Legendary items simply gave health regen instead of the Incorporeal passive.
VOIDGRUBS
This patch, we’re changing the shield buff that Voidgrubs receive to a heal. This is intended to eliminate any confusion on when to smite a Voidgrub since the shield was not accounted for in the displayed health amount. This should function fairly similarly to before and we hope this change helps junglers with timing their smite and securing that sweet, voidy, grubby buff.
In this patch, we have a few straightforward damage dealt and taken adjustments, but we’re also trying out something new with Ziggs. We’ve seen players get frustrated by the flat 20% damage reduction nerf Ziggs has on ARAM, but we want to be cautious with his overall power level so he doesn’t insta-win games. We’re giving him some damage back this patch, but aiming to keep him in check by decreasing the amount of damage he can do to structures. Let us know how you like this one!
We also want to reassure you that Smolder is definitely on our watch list, but since he’s getting nerfed this patch we want to see how those changes land on ARAM before potentially overnerfing the lad.
Our next Clash tournament for ARAM kicks off this weekend!
If you have any questions or you're just looking for the full 2024 clash schedule, make sure to check out our Clash FAQ support page.
Starting with this patch, we'll be making some updates to the replay system. While you won't notice any changes on your end, this will help us make improvements behind the scenes. This update will remove any saved replays created during this patch earlier than usual, but as soon as the update goes through the replay system will return to saving and storing replays for ~14 days as normal.
We're rolling this change out one or two regions at a time, so make sure you check the below list to know what date to save your replays by:
We're back with another bulk update for the Mythic Shop rotation. Similar to the patch notes from earlier this year, here are the rotations for the next ~3 months of Mythic Shop.
The following skins will be released in this patch:
The following chromas will be released this patch: