Greetings, Summoners.
This patch is a bit of a grab bag, with good stuff all around. We’ve got a broader assortment of changes than we can cover in an intro, but we’ll do our best to hit the highlights.
Ryze’s update leads us off. He’s got a brand new ult, so don’t be surprised if packs of enemies warp into the middle of a Baron fight to steal your purple buff. That’s a thing Ryze does now! Snark aside, interested parties should really read his update article for a proper explanation.
Moving on, let’s talk Treeline. Recent seasonal events left wrinkles in the 3v3 ecosystem, such as the prevalence of marksmen following the most recent preseason. We’re taking steps to address these distortions, with the bulk of our approach coming from itemization shifts. (Fare thee well, Sanguine Blade.)
Last on our list of topics, Sona and Leona continue 6.13’s effort to make supports more satisfying to play. Downtime was the problem for both champions: once their initial rotation of spells was spent, they were left twiddling their thumbs until their abilities came off cooldown. We’re giving Leona new things to do post-initiation, while Sona will be doing the same stuff as ever, but at a much faster clip.
We’ve kept you up here long enough, so that’ll do it for us this patch! May your spellcasts be satisfying and your cooldowns well-pinged.
Patrick "Scarizard" Scarborough
Paul "Aether" Perscheid
Mattias "Gentleman Gustaf" Lehman
Boka "LaBoka" Agboje
Mid-Patch Updates
We knew going into 6.14 that speeding up Sona's gameplay would be a significant buff. Though we threw in a few power-downs to compensate, it's clear at this point those adjustments weren't enough to keep Sona in line. We're making a few immediate changes to tone her back down, then see if we need to follow up again in 6.15.
NOTE: Because these are quick changes, Sona's tooltips may be out of whack until we can update them next patch!
W - Aria of Perseverance
E - Song of Celerity
Champions
Ryze, the Rune Mage, will be updated with the launch of patch 6.14! To learn more, check the following links:
Leona
Q cooldown reduced. E root duration up. R damage down. New passive on R.
When we think of Leona, two things come to mind: the sun and crowd control. Leona’s success is predicated on landing her CC so her teammates can light up enemy champions. But what does Leona do after locking the enemy team down? Right now, the answer is “not much.”
Adding to her woes, Leona is eclipsed at higher levels of play by other tanks who offer value throughout a teamfight, not just at the beginning (your Braums, your Alistars). Leona’s lockdown may be strong enough at lower skill levels to lead teammates to victory, but higher-skilled opponents are much better at punishing Leona (and her team) while her abilities are on cooldown. Capitalizing on moments of vulnerability is really just the correct way to play League of Legends, but with how quickly Leona expends her payload, this punishment is all too frequent.
To fix this, we’re ushering in A New Dawn for Leona, giving her more to do throughout teamfights via Solar Flare’s new passive. In addition, changes to Q and E mean that foes will have a harder time finding the shade when Leona comes for them.
(Quick closing note, the Shield of Daybreak range and Zenith Blade root duration buffs accidentally shipped last patch. Sorry, not-Leonas!)
Passive - Sunlight
Q - Shield of Daybreak
W - Eclipse
E - Zenith Blade
R - Solar Flare
Sona
R reduces QWE cooldowns instead of amplifying auras. A bunch of other stuff. Trust us, just read this one.
Things have been quiet for Sona over the past few seasons, so the sheer volume of changes here may look intimidating. In actuality, they all lead to one simple outcome: “Sona plays more music.” Let’s begin.
Sona shares a problem with many supports: it feels like she’s not doing much, even when she’s doing a lot. To tackle that problem, we’re playing into her unique game of musical buffs. Here's how it works: as fights unfold, Sona cycles between abilities, sending pulses of utility to nearby allies. Spellcasting activates Power Chord, offering Sona choices in how to neutralize her foes. These strengths grant Sona flexibility as the maven of extended engagements.
Here's where the feel-bad problem lies: Sona’s cadence is too slow to fulfill that fantasy. Dead air between beats creates downtime for both auras and Power Chords, relegating Sona to the background track. A remastered Crescendo passive solves that problem as Sona levels up, combining with cooldown reduction to cut her basic ability cooldowns by up to 67%. Understandably, we're adjusting the rest of Sona's kit to ensure she doesn’t go off the rails. Overall, Sona’s left with clearer purpose: transform fights into endless streams of song (and utility) as she scales into late-game.
General
R - Crescendo
We’re listing Crescendo out of order because everything else is based off these changes. You’re not crazy!
Passive - Power Chord
Q - Hymn of Valor
W - Aria of Perseverance
E - Song of Celerity
Annie
Tibbers is a less dumb bear. Still growls, though.
Just a few more improvements to Tibbers following Annie’s midseason update. With a smarter bear, the sky’s the limit for Annie players everywhere.
R - Summon: Tibbers
Azir
Soldiers deal less damage while Azir levels up but are unchanged at level 18. They also grant less vision.
The Emperor of Shurima is a champion that needs no introduction - especially when it comes to why he’s back here in the patch notes. Azir’s problems are many, but can be oversimplified as ‘too many pros, not enough cons’. Amazing sustained damage, long-ranged initiation, really cool armor - he’s got it all. This patch, we’re taking a crack at his damage progression over the course of the game.
Azir’s a champion with game-ending potential, but while champions with similar strength (hypercarries) are gated behind difficult early-games (Vayne) or steep item requirements (Kog’Maw), Azir doesn’t really have a period of weakness to exploit. He just sort of pokes you from afar, leaning on the generous base damage of his soldiers while he gathers enough ability power to dominate late-game. We’re altering soldier damage progression to dip significantly as Azir approaches mid-game, meaning his posse of sand-clad scallywags can no longer bail him out if he falls behind early. This period of weakness presents an actual hurdle for Azir to overcome. Should he make it through that dry spell, however, his soldiers’ damage evens back out at max level. This means the Emperor will still crush 50-minute teamfights like you’d expect.
W - Arise!
Fiora
Passive heals more. Q scaling increased at early levels.
Fiora’s a devastating side-lane duelist when given the appropriate support, but she’s struggling to find success outside of the professional scene. As mentioned with Azir above, it’s important for late-game powerhouses to have early windows of vulnerability, but the degree to which Fiora's being punished at early levels is just a bit too high. We’re improving Fiora’s early trade potential to help tip the scales in her favor when the Grand Duelist starts making the right moves.
Passive - Duelist's Dance
Q - Lunge
Illaoi
Q indicator is more accurate for the enemy.
With Illaoi getting a little more of the spotlight, we noticed her opponents having a tougher-than-normal time dodging some of her stray tentacle slams. Fighting Illaoi should test your spirit, not your ability to judge misleading indicators.
General
Lee Sin
W shield increased.
Safeguard’s shield is pretty flimsy even at max rank. We’re giving it a healthy bump to give allies a real chance of survival when Lee Sin makes a clutch play to save them.
W - Safeguard
Lux
Passive damage up. Q damage down.
Lux isn’t struggling too hard these days, and yet her success tapers off at higher levels of play. We’re giving a bit of a nudge to the skilled Lux players out there by shifting power into successful spell-weaving instead of single spell-hits. This shouldn’t rock the boat for the average player (as activating your passive just once at level 6 breaks even on damage), but rewards Luxes who optimize their combos.
Passive - Illumination
Q - Light Binding
Malzahar
Movement speed and attack range down.
Unlike some of the other changes in 6.14, Malzahar’s are pretty clean-cut. We’re happy with how Void Shift’s gameplay incentivizes chipping away at Malzahar’s defenses, but his range and raw pushing power give him too much control over when opponents get to interact with him. Laning against Malzahar should feel interactive, so we’re giving opponents more windows to find favorable trades when Malzahar goes all-in on shoving the wave.
General
Poppy
Passive cooldown and damage down. Passive shield and W speed increased.
Struggling to regain her footing after her last round of changes, Poppy’s reliability as an initiator has dropped significantly. Frankly, that reliability isn’t something we’re in a rush to restore - we want Poppy’s power to come from her disruption, not diving the back-line. Poppy shines brightest when she positions herself to lock down as many enemies as possible, so we’re improving her ability to thrive in the close-quarters fracas she creates.
Passive - Iron Ambassador
W - Steadfast Presence
Rek'Sai
W’s cooldown on tracking individual targets up.
Often in the patch notes, we’ll refer to certain high-variance mechanics or champions - the success of which varies heavily depending on a player’s skill or group coordination. Vision’s one of these mechanics - while things like warding are important (really, do it), it’s more where you ward and how your team uses that information that can make or break a strategic stand-off.
When it comes to variance in champion abilities, Rek’Sai’s Tremor Sense has some of the highest in the League. It’s one thing to know where your enemies are, but when Rek’Sai provides near-perfect information on enemy positions, things start to get pretty crazy (like increasing skillshot accuracy or almost completely deterring invades). We’re looking to dial back Rek’Sai’s team contributions, making the information she provides more about telling you ‘They’re somewhere over here!’ rather than ‘They’re exactly here!’ Tremor Sense is still one of the most powerful information-gathering tools in the game, but allowing enemies more ways to play against it keeps it feeling like a proper mind-game and not just an ankle monitor.
W - Burrow
Taliyah
W cooldown up and cast lockout removed. E damage down.
Still fresh to the League, Taliyah’s as rewarding to those that master her as she is difficult to learn. We like steep skill curves, but Taliyah’s mechanics can present more of a burden than a challenge. In particular, Seismic Shove’s spell lockout and two-cast paradigm can leave Taliyah’s stone-weaving feeling straight-up unresponsive.
Let’s be clear on one thing: removing this lockout is really powerful (like, Taliyah’s probably crazy as a result). Having witnessed some of the resulting shenanigans during testing, we’re taking pre-emptive measures to soften the best-case of her now much-more-reliable ‘Seismic Shove + Unraveled Earth’ combo. Things might be rocky for a while, but we’re confident that smoother Stoneweaver gameplay paves the road for a balanced Taliyah in the long-term.
W - Seismic Shove
E - Unraveled Earth
Viktor
Viktor’s first Hex-Core upgrade costs more, but the last costs less.
Like Malzahar, Viktor’s a champion whose laning phase goes from ‘careful control of the minion wave’ to ‘invalidate your opponent’s actions with god-tier waveclear’ immediately following an early Hex Core. We like how Viktor’s power progresses naturally from laning to bigger group fights, but the efficiency of Aftershock’s clearing potential almost ensures that he’s ahead of the gold-curve once he gets there. In the interest of giving his opponents a chance to catch up, we’re putting the brakes on how soon Viktor starts ramping up. He’ll still be a consistent threat in tight areas, but setting him back in lane should have a greater impact on his grand designs.
Passive - Glorious Evolution
Yasuo
A whirlwind of bugfixes.
Yasuo mains are people, too. Kind of.
General
Q - Steel Tempest
W - Wind Wall
E - Sweeping Blade
Cloud Drake
Stacks grant more movement speed.
What's there to say about the Cloud Drake that hasn't been said? Ever since the release of the Elemental Dragons, Cloud’s rested at the bottom of the pack in terms of satisfaction. While we're not averse to giving it a new buff altogether, we first want to take a crack at amping the current effect to see whether ol’ windbag was simply undertuned.
Twisted Treeline
Jungle Rewards
Experience rewards decreased. Gold rewards increased. Monster health increased.
Fun fact: the last time we made adjustments to Twisted Treeline was back in patch 5.11. That was 27 patches ago. Since then, we’ve shipped preseason, midseason, and a ton of other stuff. Some of those changes have thrown the Treeline out of whack, so we’re taking steps to right the ship.
First up are adjustments to the jungle. Preseason’s changes to jungler items flipped their camp bonuses from gold to experience. Today’s Treeline junglers are, as a result, finishing their clears over-leveled and under-gilded (and with higher health than intended, due to earlier level scaling). We’re re-tuning the camps to better complement today’s jungle arsenal.
General
Golems
Wolves
Wraiths
Outer Turrets
Armor and magic resistance increased.
We introduced outer turrets last year to create safe havens in the early game. That was before preseason’s marksman update (the turret’s natural predator). Treeline turret destruction has escalated with the rise of League’s shootiest class, so we’re increasing outer turret sturdiness to keep them relevant a bit longer.
Recommended Items
Recommended items for most champions have been updated.
Between the item changes below and general gameplay shifts over the past year, many Treeline item sets were showing their age. We investigated, and decided a wholesale revamp was the way to go.
Removed Items
Various map-specific items removed.
Sanguine Blade
Let’s start with Sanguine Blade. It was created as a cheap and efficient purchase for traditional marksmen, jump-starting their late-game scaling which otherwise never reached fruition in Treeline’s shorter game times. Amidst our preseason changes to marksman itemization, that efficiency’s been pushed from “necessary evil” to “delirious overtuning”, and Sanguine Blade is now stifling the item diversity preseason was meant to foster. Turns out you can have too much of a good thing, so we’re saying farewell to Sanguine Blade.
Dervish Blade
Overlord's Bloodmail
These two items are in the same boat, so we’re melding their contexts into one. Dervish Blade and Overlord’s Bloodmail were originally introduced because their Rift cousins (Mercurial Scimitar and Warmog’s Armor) were too big for the Treeline, albeit in different ways. Scimitar was exceedingly difficult to build due to its B. F. Sword component, while Warmog’s was too powerful for the 3v3 environment. Both problems have been addressed, so we’re trading these Treeline items in for their bigger versions.
Lord Van Damm's Pillager
Wicked Hatchet
Spoiler alert: Pillager won’t be gone for long. With the introduction of Infinity Edge (second spoiler alert!), Pillager no longer needs to fill the role of “Treeline version of a Rift item”, so we’re temporarily retiring it. This, incidentally, means Wicked Hatchet is a dead-end item. We don’t want it skulking around the item shop, so we’re retiring it for good.
B. F. Sword family
Now on Twisted Treeline.
Prior to last November’s preseason update, B. F. Sword was too expensive to have a home on Twisted Treeline. The burden of saving for one would have been madness in an environment where marksmen naturally struggled to scale into relevance, so we gave the Treeline its own cheaper, Pickaxe-based alternatives to B. F.’s upgrades. As discussed above, however, things have changed, so we’re now comfortable introducing this suite of items to the Treeline.
B. F. Sword
Infinity Edge
Essence Reaver
The Bloodthirster
Duskblade of Draktharr
Thornmail
Now on Twisted Treeline.
Another prisoner of the “marksmen used to suck” world order, we left Thornmail off the Treeline since marksmen who clawed their way to relevance probably deserved to be there. Marksmen are now, if anything, too dominant, so it’s high time Thornmail emerged onto the Treeline.
Mercurial Scimitar
Now on Twisted Treeline. Replaces Dervish Blade.
We covered this one up in the Removed Items section above. Go find Dervish Blade, read it, then cross this off your checklist.
Warmog's Armor
Now on Twisted Treeline. Replaces Overlord’s Bloodmail.
This was also covered in the Removed Items section. Here’s a clue: check Overlord’s Bloodmail. We’re really shooting for word count efficiency this time.
Cooldown Pings
Ping icons to put relevant information in chat.
We’ll let this one speak for itself. This has been a longstanding request from the community and we finally found some time to make it happen. More team coordination’s never a bad thing, and we’re excited to see how you make use of these new pings!
The following icons can be pinged to automatically provide information to your team via chat:
- Abilities (remaining cooldown or insufficient resource warning)
- Summoner spells (remaining cooldown)
- Major items (remaining cooldown when relevant, indication of completion otherwise)
- Vision items, including trinkets (cooldown or ward charges)
- Health and resource bars (current percent)
- Jungle timers. Just click them.
Champion Mastery
Mastery grade calculations for supports will be adjusted during this patch.
Since we introduced mastery levels 6 & 7, support players felt even more incentivized to snipe kills to pad their stats and improve their chance at an S or S+. We’re re-tuning the system, sorting out some additional variables so supports get more credit for support-y game-winning plays.
Nexus Siege
The all-new Nexus Siege mode hits RGM queue back to back weekends.
Explodification abounds in this round-based attack and defense mode. Nexus Siege is coming to the Rotating Game Mode queue this patch - schedule and strategy guide coming soon!
Bugfixes
- Rift Scuttler’s health bar no longer takes a few moments to appear when revealed for the first time
- Zyra’s Passive - Garden of Thorns no longer re-activates while Zyra is recalling in brush, giving away her location
- Braum no longer instantly dies if he tries to block Baron Nashor’s Acid Shot with E - Unbreakable at the exact wrong moment
- When Darius’s E - Apprehend pulls enemies over walls, it no longer chest-bumps them back to the side they were on to begin with
- Graves is no longer briefly stunned if an enemy tries to displace him as he casts R - Collateral Damage
- Graves’s W - Smoke Screen no longer fizzles if cast immediately before Graves fires his second basic attack charge
- Fixed a bug where Elise’s Spiderlings sometimes took no damage from Graves’s basic attacks
- Fixed a bug where the active effect of Hextech GLP-800 wasn’t always being properly reduced by Ruby Sightstone’s active item cooldown reduction
- Health bars for Aether Wing Kayle, Iron Inquisitor Kayle, and Riot Kayle have been bumped up to match their height on Kayle’s other skins
- Fixed some flickering in Blood Lord Vladimir’s R - Hemoplague cast visuals
- Bad Santa Veigar's custom particles for W - Dark Matter have been restored. Merry Christmas.
- Restored the pathing indicator line that appears between clicking on Snow Day Bard’s E - Magical Journey and entering it to become a penguin
- Removed a few seam lines on Muay Thai Lee Sin’s model at Very Low settings
- Headless Hecarim’s smoke effects no longer stutter
- Fixed a texture issue on the top of Fnatic Gragas’s
barrelSummoner’s Cup - Removed a random pipe that appeared in Commando Jarvan IV’s knee during his walk animation
- Fixed a stretching issue with Pool Party Lulu’s hat during her death animation
- Championship Shyvana’s teeth in dragon form are no longer super elastic when she roars
Upcoming Skins
The following skins will be released during patch 6.14!
 Pool Party Fiora |
 Pool Party Miss Fortune |
 Pool Party Taric |
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