[Patch 15.4] LoL 25.S1.4 Patch Notes

Wednesday 19 February.

Champion Buffs

1. Ashe
2. GP
3. Ekko
4. Jayce
5. Nautilus
6. Rakan
7. Sion
8. Teemo
9. Yasuo

Champion Nerfs

1. Garen
2. Hwei
3. Kalista
4. Kog'Maw
5. Lulu
6. Warwick

Champions Adjusted

1. Mel
2. Diana
3. Elise
4. Twitch

System Buffs

1. Mercury's Treads
2. Symbiotic Soles

System Nerfs

• Unending Despair: Base damage removed

• Heartsteel: Bonus health reduced from 10% of damage to 8%

• Fimbulwinter: Base shield reduced from 100 - 180 to 100 flat

• Abyssal Mask: MR reduced from 50 to 45

• Plated Steelcaps

System Adjustments

1. Infinity Edge

Tank Items

• After an extended period last year of being quite weak and unsatisfying, tank items have found their footing in a strong way, especially for normal play but also in high levels for some of them
• A lof of tanks in those times were opting into things like Thornmail 2nd item (in particular), which indicated that they don’t really have any good item choices
• Being able to opt into specialized items like Thornmail 2nd sometimes is OK, but it feels pretty unsatisfying when it’s the option in most games, especially when playing against magic damage compositions
• Unending Despair was reworked to be this 2nd baseline item to allow players to pivot off this foundation if an option is better (eg. MR heavy vs magic, AR heavy vs phys)
• From our player surveys, champs like Mundo, Kench, Skarner, K’Sante, etc. who prominently use these items and are high on “perceived strength” will be nerfed

Boots

• We’re also doing a small pass to the boot options to ensure they are better balanced; these and the changes above will also systemically help ADC’s do more damage in most games
• Steelcaps in particular has been a bit too good at shutting down these types of damage

Attack Speed Cap

• With the buffs to attack speed cap last patch, Kog has been pretty happy with that
• A bit... too happy; so we're taking him down a peg

Mel

• For Mel, we are looking at some changes this patch to reduce her frustration, by bringing down her range and reliability slightly, lowering the forgiveness on her W a bit, now that players have had time to learn her, reducing her rank 1 root duration and making her R damage more dependent on having stacks
• Mel sports a pretty low winrate on her first game in particular, but after players have played a few games, this rapidly increases

Elise

• Elise is a champion who’s had a dramatic rise in the support role; we’re not looking to swat her out of there too quickly, but her jungle has been slightly weak and we’re looking to distribute a bit of power into that role without removing her from support.

Item Changes

• As mentioned yesterday, we're trying to make ADC's feel better through the IE changes and hit some of the outliers on Tank items
• Primary IE crit carry builders, especially in higher levels of play have not been particularly strong in the meta compared to say Kalista, Varus, Ezreal, Corki
• This IE change is intended to be a light buff to those archetypes (who are typically more popular in solo q) without sending them overboard in optimized/high skill play in particular
• Tank items are feeling like they have a pretty good systemic foundation baseline to build on currently, so hopefully we can leave them here for a while

Atakhan

• This patch we're making some changes to impact the rate at which Voracious and Ruinous Atakhan spawn in games
• Our intention is to do some tuning changes that make Ruinous Atakhan more likely to show up in Pro games without changing the rate that he shows up in regular games much (which is about ~15% of the time in slow games)
• We hope to get this balance in a good spot by the time First Stand comes around

Mel

• Mel's winrate this patch is being tanked by her W being erroneously suggested to be maxed 2nd (which we're fixing for this patch)
• She's getting a significant influx of new players, which is tanking her winrate somewhat, but she's still very popular which is great
• Changes this patch are targeting at opening up moments of vulnerability, through early E duration, lowering her effective range and W duration
• This should require her to get in range more, stay in range to build up R stacks and be more vulnerable when doing so
• We're intending her to be weak into beefy frontlines that she has to stack up and a bit more friendly/enemy comp dependent (setup for E, needs a good reflect to scale well)
• In solo Q she's intended to be a lot more effective and she is intended to start to fall off around 3 items-ish, but have pretty comfortable ramp up until then (this may need to change at some point in the future though)

Ashe

• Ashe took a pretty significant hit from the changes on 15.1, so we're looking to pull that back a bit

Kalista

• Has been extremely high presence, even in fearless world, so we're pulling the changes back there a bit

Warwick

• Warwick top has emerged as a pretty strong pick over a pretty extended period of time, so we're looking to take him down a tad there with a top skewed nerf