[Patch 15.5] LoL 25.S1.5 Patch Notes

March 5, 2025.

Continued Anti-Lane Swap changes:

• Top lane end timer reduced from 4:00 to 3:30

• Minion damage increased from 300% to 1000% (while detecting)

• No longer grants 20% bonus gold and XP to defending champ (while detecting)

• Detection linger duration increased from 6 seconds to 20/8 (top/mid)

• Top lane turret now deals 1000% damage against enemy champs (while detecting)

• Top lane turret now grants defending champ 50% damage reduction (while detecting)

• Fortification buff removed for all turrets

• If two non-jungler enemy champs appear in top or mid lane, the outer turrets now gains:

• 95% damage reduction

• Attacks are fully charged

• Deals 300% damage to minions

• Enemy champs gold and XP reduced to 50%

• Defending minion and turret kills will redirect all gold to nearest allied champ

• Defending champ gains 20% bonus gold and XP

• Detection starts at 1:30 and ends at 4:00 for top and 2:25 for mid

• Image is the rough detection radius courtesy of FranktheBoxMonstr from Discord

Champion Buffs

Champion Nerfs

Champions Adjusted

System Buffs

System Nerfs

System Adjustments

Hi everyone,

You may have seen the anti-lane swap changes that made their way to PBE today.

Changes The changes (as of today) are as follows:

• Lane Swap Detection
• 2 enemy champions, both of whom don’t have jungle item, are in the offending lane or surrounding area

• Timer is 1:30 - 3:30 for top lane and 1:30 - 2:15 for mid lane
• If the team has no junglers, this rule is disabled
• If the team has two or more junglers, junglers are included in the check

• While Detected

• Defending turret has 95% damage reduction
• Defending turret one shots minions
• Defending turret and minions give gold and XP from their kills to the nearest allied champion in the lane
• Offending champions gain 50% less gold and XP from minions.
• This lingers for 25 seconds in top lane, 6 seconds in mid lane..

• Top only:

• Defending turret one shots champions
• Defending champion has 50% damage reduction under their turret (~300u range)

Temporary Nature These changes are temporary and, by extension, heavy handed by necessity. We intend to work on longer term solutions (similar to how we addressed funnel, double support items, etc.) but an elegant solution that solves the problem without adding excess long term rules to the game will take time and we’ll keep these rules in the game until that solution is ready.

Many viewers and Pros alike have expressed that lane swaps undermine something that makes League awesome; that the best top laners can fight the best top laners and the best bot lanes can fight the best bot lanes. As a result, we feel like it is necessary to make these changes at this time.

These rules are intended to address the most expectation breaking versions of lane swaps starting from level 1, but they are not intended to affect the time periods significantly after that, as swaps at that point provide lower benefits and more closely resemble “normal League of Legends”.

We want League of Legends played in Pro to look as close as possible to the League of Legends we all play. Due to lane swaps, this is not true for many Pro games right now. While Fearless Draft and Tournament Draft pick/ban might have different rules for regular players and Pros, the actions in game are governed by the same rules.

Feedback so far We’ve also seen the comments about this affecting regular play and potential griefers.

We are trying to strike the best balance between minimizing impact to regular play and maximizing effectiveness in reducing lane swaps in pro play.

We put a lot of thought into ways that this might manifest in regular play and hit innocent players like level 2 ganking mid, a Twitch or Teemo level 1 ganking with stealth. Ultimately, we didn’t feel like we could effectively eliminate lane swaps without some amount of collateral damage to these strategies, but we are trying to mitigate with things like a shorter duration for these rules in midlane and linger durations so players incidentally pathing through these lanes don’t grief their teammates. As mentioned above, we don’t want this to be the reality forever.

Finally, we know that bad actors may attempt to use these changes as a testbed for griefing. Simply put, if you engage in this behavior to grief your teammates, we will detect it and punish you.

Patch 25.5 is going to be the patch for First Stand and more Pro focused

Atakhan

• In patch 25.4, we increased the occurrence rate of Ruinous in Pro; so far results have been promising; around half of the games in LPL (the only major region on 25.4) have been Ruinous.
• We intend for around 60% of games to be Ruinous in Pro while not completely removing it for Solo Q

Lane Swaps

• Adjustments today are to remove some of the edge cases, like deep proxy-ing, various lane shift strategies and giving better warnings for players about to incidentally run into the penalty playing innocently
• We're increasing the mid penalty time back to 3:30 just to avoid any shenanigans for First Stand and are open to relaxing it a bit after that if the changes are proven to work, to avoid overly hitting soloQ
• As mentioned earlier, please don't bother trying to grief people in soloQ with this, we will detect this and punish you
• We're also adding a warning area to inform players that they will enter the zone right before they're penalized (it is also very loud if triggered)

Pro Balance

• We're going a little heavier on nerfs this patch; we overshot on Ashe so pulling some of that back. Outside of Ashe and Aphelios, we're not really looking to shake up ADC meta that much as it will likely change post lane swaps
• Some of the high presence Pro options we're also tapping down to make the meta a bit more vibrant for First Stand, but overall we're pretty happy with how the meta is looking going into the tournament

Runes

• We're buffing some of the weaker options here, like Sixth Sense and Unflinching, while pulling some of the power out of Axiom
• It's a little too strong in particularly its best cases, but also just overall
• We're still discussing internally the interaction of things like true damage, damage amps and better defining our principles around them
• With the intersections of highly impactful systems and content that is meaningfully influenced by it on the top end (eg. GarenR), we either change the systems or the content, but need to be careful of only balancing around that particular top end interaction
• Will let you know when we have more to share here

Tanks

• After Tank item changes last patch, we're continuing to monitor the effects of how all of these will shake out
• We are buffing Mundo, because he fell further than the rest and normally rests higher than where he landed
• We're specifically not buffing Tahm Kench as he is a champ that we don't feel needs to live above 50% for his frustration cost; he consistently rates among the highest frustration on our surveys and his gameplay often feels some of the least interactive of the group

Melee Crit

• Melee Crit carries have been left without a crit first item for a long time; while YunTal is not the most complete package for them, it is their most potentially viable option and can help them feel a bit more supported by the system

Zed

• Zed has been resting in a pretty weak state for quite a while, especially compared to Season 14
• We're giving him a small buff to get him back to his previous levels
• In particular, he's very frequently played bruiser, which is fine sometimes but when it's close to his most common build, typically means his assassin pattern isn't functioning particularly well

Jorick

• Jungle Yorick has been cropping up as a terror in particularly lower skill play with his... Liandrys 3rd build
• Looking to take the power of this down a bunch

Speed'gath

• Speedgath in the midlane has been picking up a lot of steam
• We're looking to do some nerfs to specifically Mid Cho without harming Top too much; and trying to nerf both top end Q and W so that he doesn't just swap maxes (we think of the spells to max, Q is higher gameplay than W)

Pro focused nerfs

• A lot of Pro focused nerfs this patch aimed to try and add more diversity into particularly the game 1's of the series which often tend to play out very similarly
• This is a hit to many of the safe blinds and/or high prio champs that target some of their more Pro oriented characteristics