Oh why, hello there!
Midseason has been here for a patch, which means it’s time to revisit the slate of changes and course-correct for any who aren’t hitting the mark. That means a few followup changes to the three tanks, additional usability for quests, and a tweak to Spirit Visage.
We’re also taking this time to hit some overperforming champions and bring them in line. Fizz and Lulu are no strangers to patch notes, and Ivern has been one of the top junglers for awhile now. Knocking them down a peg should leave other champions more room to shine.
Finally we’re delivering modernization improvements to a number of champions. The scale ranges from playstyle updates for Heimerdinger - yes, that Heimerdinger - and Rammus - yes, that Rammus - but also small quality of life tweaks (animations for Riven or Jax).
But wait, there’s more! If you enjoyed the ARAM changes from last time, we’re adding more on top of them to streamline the Howling Abyss experience.
Whether you’re dropping turrets with Heimerdinger or tremoring them down with Rammus, see you on the Rift, summoners!
Paul "Aether" Perscheid
Phillip "Costy" Costigan
Mattias "Gentleman Gustaf" Lehman
Lucas "Liquizilla" MoutinhoChampions
Heimerdinger
More turrets, more rockets, more grenades. W and E hits charge turret beam attacks. Passive grants self movement speed near turrets instead of ally/turret health regen.
ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ It’s been quite a while since Heimerdinger got any attention. His “nest of autonomous turrets” fantasy is unique, but when AI-controlled units comprise the bulk of Heimer’s strength, it becomes difficult to get Heimerdinger to a fair spot. On the one hand, Heimer deserves to be competitive against opponents who know the ins and outs of turret behavior. On the other, when turrets are intelligent enough to fight enemies without Heimer’s assistance, they become overly punishing against players (and champions) who lack the ability to out-manipulate their AI.
That brings us to today’s update, which puts Heimerdinger more squarely in the driver’s seat of his turret gameplay. We’ve removed a number of turret “self-preservation” rules, meaning that deploying a turret is much less of a fire-and-forget affair. Rocket and grenade hits are now the primary means by which turrets charge their laser attacks, meaning Heimer needs to play an active role in fights to unleash their full potential. We’ve given power-ups to W and E to ensure Heimerdinger feels good about using the rest of his kit, which means he’ll also have more of an impact in fights where he’s unable to prep his turrets in advance.
Overall, this update gives the Revered Inventor more playmaking potential and fairer interactions with other champions. As always, we’ll be observing his statistical performance closely as his update deploys to live environments. Should any unexpected fluctuations in the trajectory of his aggregate data require further modulation of output variables, we’ll do appropriate science to get him in a stable spot. ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ
Base stats
Passive - Hextech Affinity
Q - H-28G Evolution Turret
More turrets early. Base damage down, ratio up. Beam attack charges more slowly but is massively accelerated by W and E hits. Turrets are less punishing toward melee enemies.
W - Hextech Micro-Rockets
E - CH-2 Electron Storm Grenade
UPGRADE!!! E - CH-3X Lightning Grenade
Rammus
Q is faster, has a shorter cooldown but also last for less time. W amplifies his passive but also slows Rammus. E grants attack speed, R now applies slows but does less damage.
While we originally passed on Rammus when planning our midseason work, we landed on an opportunity to give him some love later on in the process. Rammus’s playstyle, like his vocabulary, is overly simple: if he can navigate through a fight and Powerball a juicy target, the rest of his abilities are basically no-brainers. Once he’s in the enemy team, of course he wants to Taunt a priority target and of course he wants to be extra tanky and of course he wants to do damage. There weren’t enough points where he needed to think about when to use his abilities.
Reducing Powerball’s duration but having Rammus go faster more often will allow him to decide when he wants to try and chase someone or just back up. When he does go in, we’re giving his other skills slightly more complexity to give him decisions about how he wants to use them. Curling up will still make him incredibly tanky but at the expense of movespeed, and his ult will now steadily stack a slow on people around him. Now, the Armordillo has to decide whether to slow one target to a crawl, or stand still while he takes the heat for the team.
Passive - Spiked Shell
Q - Powerball
W - Defensive Ball Curl
E - Frenzying Taunt
R - Tremors
For real thissssssssss time.
General
Fizz
W base damages down, ratios up.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before - a sticky assassin builds primarily defensively and yet still does enough damage to threaten tanks and squishies alike. Fizz’s changes this patch are just another shade of updates past - paring down his base damage while boosting his scaling to compensate.
W - Seastone Trident
Graves
Q base damages down, ratios up. R cooldown increased at early ranks.
Despite changes earlier in the season, we’re still seeing enemies of the Outlaw torn asunder. Our approach this patch is to hit his early game in two-pronged fashion. First, we’re shifting some of End of the Line’s power to its bonus attack damage ratios, reducing his early game burst. We’re also hitting Collateral Damage’s cooldown in the early game, as it can often feel like his ult is always available. This should force Graves to really consider the best time to use Collateral Damage, rather than just firing it on cooldown.
Q - End of the Line
R - Collateral Damage
For a character whose gameplay revolves around basic attacks, Jax’s attack animations left some to be desired.
General
Ivern
Movement speed reduced. Passive groves cost more health and mana.
As Ivern players have gotten better at planning jungle routes - or adapting them on the fly - one thing has become clear: he is too able to keep one step ahead of opposing junglers. The relatively low costs on Friend of the Forest give Ivern insanely flexible paths, which means even when opposing teams do a good job at tracking him, he’s able to change plans without much cost. Specifically, his ability to save Smite for clearspeed - and not require its sustain - allows him to save smite for invades without sacrificing much in the way of channeling his own camps.
Base stats
Passive - Friend of the Forest
Lee Sin
Movement speed reduced. R cooldown increased.
Lee Sin has more uptime than almost any jungler, thanks to how easily he can move around the map and how often his ultimate is up. The Blind Monk already has two gap-closers that let him chase - or escape - enemy champions. Having best-in-class movement speed on top of that seemed like overkill.
Base stats
R - Dragon's Rage
Lulu
Base health reduced. E shield strength reduced.
Lulu’s become the pick when you want someone with a bit of everything - Aggression? She has it. Protection? She has it. The problem gets real when the Fae Sorceress becomes the best option in both cases, outshining the rest of the enchantress club. We’re leaving Lulu’s poke and trade potential intact, but softening her durability so opponents can better punish missteps and poorly-chosen trades.
Base stats
E - Help, Pix!
Kassadin
E hitbox modernization.
It’s time, Kassadin.
E - Force Pulse
Maokai
Q mana and cooldown down. Q knockback distance slightly increased. E damage reduced.
While Maokai’s update gave him the desired incentives to play around brush, empowered saplings are dealing too much damage in the early game (especially if maxed first). This is particularly prevalent at game-start: a single empowered sapling massively interferes with the enemy jungler’s initial clear. We’re reining in sapling damage so E spam doesn’t remain the strongest thing Maokai can do.
With saplings powered down in the early game, we wanted to be sure Maokai still has the strength he needs to make it through the jungle and top lane. We’re upping the impact of his melee-range tools to give him the means to hold his own mid-combat.
Passive - Sap Magic
Q - Bramble Smash
E - Sapling Toss
R - Nature's Grasp
Rakan
Q cast range increased. W damage increased at later ranks. E shield decreased at later ranks.
While other enchanters like Janna and Lulu naturally want to max their shields, that doesn’t seem particularly appropriate for Rakan. Rather than perpetually clinging to allies, the Charmer should feel good about busting a move in the middle of the enemy team. We’re rescaling a few of Rakan’s ability level-up incentives to encourage him to hit the dance floor.
We’re also giving Gleaming Quill’s cast range a bump. Rakan’s healing is potent on paper, but in practice, he doesn’t get to take advantage of it as often as as you’d expect. A range increase should provide Rakan better access to his healing, particularly in his more punishing matchups.
Q - Gleaming Quill
W - Grand Entrance
E - Battle Dance
Renekton
Cleanin’ up even more stuff.
W - Ruthless Predator
E - Slice and Dice
Riven
Timing of Q animation cancelling is more consistent. If you don’t know what animation cancelling is, you should just skip this section.
While animation cancelling has been integrated into Riven’s coding for some time now, there are still a lot of timing inconsistencies that make learning her frustrating, especially for players on higher-latency connections. We’re cleaning these up so mastering Riven feels like a test of your reflexes, not your internet connection.
General
Q - Broken Wings
E - Valor
Sejuani
Frost Armor grants fewer flat resistances at early levels.
Sejuani came out of the midseason gates more ferociously than we had intended. Her mid-patch follow up brought her much closer to an acceptable balance state but Frost Armor is still out of line in early game fights (particularly in lane). With these changes, the Fury of the North will still be tough while Frost Armor is up in the late game, but won’t be as overbearing in early scraps.
Passive - Fury of the North
Q - Arctic Assault
W - Winter's Wrath
Udyr
Mana costs reduced.
Back in 7.8 we made some adjustments to everyone’s favorite ManBearTigerTurtlePhoenixMonkey. Within that set of changes we tweaked Udyr’s mana costs to decrease per level rather than spell rank. The aim was to make low-rank abilities less of a drain on Udyr’s mana overall, but he lost the ability to aggressively reduce the mana costs of his main stances in the process. We’re further reducing his mana costs across the board, allowing him to go about his shapeshifting business less inhibited. We’ll likely have more follow-up changes once we’ve seen how a non-OOM’d Udyr performs, but for now you can spam to your heart's content, dear Udyr main.
General
Yorick
Quality-of-life improvements.
Yorick is pretty reliant on his summoned units, whether that’s graves, Mist Walkers, or The Maiden. Some of those units had unintuitive or frustrating behavior, so we’ve made some quality of life changes.
Passive - Shepherd of Souls
Q - Last Rites
R - Eulogy of the Isles
Zac
Q deals damage based on Zac’s max health. W and E are easier to cast during Q. E knockup duration increases over charge time.
We’ve seen steady improvement in Zac’s performance since his update landed, but there are a few rough edges to smooth out while things are still malleable. Most notably, we were overly cautious in preventing Elastic Slingshot’s knockup from guaranteeing Let’s Bounce!’s kidnap, which has left Zac’s signature move feeling pretty flat. We’re restoring Slingshot’s oomph as a long-range initiation tool and slightly bumping up Let’s Bounce!’s channel time to preserve a brief window for enemies to panic-Flash the kidnap. We’ve also got a suite of improvements for Stretching Strikes. Many are usability improvements: the slam effect is more reliable against jungle camps and minion waves, and Zac won’t lock himself out of his other skills for as long. Toss in a few direct power-ups, and Stretching Strikes should pack more of a punch across the board.
Q - Stretching Strikes
E - Elastic Slingshot
R - Let's Bounce!
Items
Ancient Coin LineWe don’t think Ancient Coin needs any major power or directional changes at the moment, but we see room for a few feel-good/quality of life changes.
Favor passive
Quest reward
Nomad's Medallion
Talisman of Ascension is the more generalist support item, so we’re shifting Nomad’s Medallion and its upgrades to carry some health regeneration (good for everybody).
Every Targon’s support knows the frustration of trying to execute minions late game, so we’re making it a bit easier to get a hit in once Relic Shield’s been upgraded to either of its final forms.
The whole point of the lockout on Spellthief’s Edge is to prevent champions from both farming waves and using the gold item - at least without some tradeoff. However, it was also punishing supports too harshly when they happened to kill a minion while poking. We’re shifting the mechanic so that minion kills may harm your overall Tribute output, but won’t stop you from using any Tribute stacks you already had.
Tribute passive
Spirit Visage
Health increased. Magic resist and health regeneration decreased.
Spirit Visage is still occupying the slot of “magic resist item you want most of the time”. To leave room for competitor items to shine against magic damage, we’re toning down overall stat pool and shifting its magic resist down a little bit.
Active Item Tracking
A continuation of last patch’s work to add recognition to active item effects!
- Righteous Glory: Number of takedowns enabled by the shockwave
- Banner of Command: Damage dealt to turrets by empowered minions (in addition to existing gold earned stat)
- Zz’Rot Portal: Damage dealt to turrets by empowered minions (in addition to existing gold earned stat)
Rift Herald
Enemy awareness improvements around Rift Herald.
Howling Abyss
Melee champions now have resistance aura, gold flow increased, inhibitor respawn sooner, significant minion changes.
In Patch 7.8 we focused on game pacing and reducing the frequency of stalemates. This patch is a follow up, touching a few things that came up as result of the last changes.
Howling Abyss aura
Thanks to the increased mana regen on Howling Abyss, mages are able to spam poke out a bit harder, which makes melee champions’ lives harder than they should be.
Gold pacing
More gold means getting more items faster. It’s just like math! Wait a second….
Minions
Siege minions exert a bunch of pressure on towers, but whichever team has the waveclear to get their siege minion to the opposing tower is the only team which gets to use that pressure. We’re alternating siege minion spawns between sides to give teams with less wave clear a chance to also exert pressure.
Super minions
Last patch’s changes to minion wave spawn rates inflated the number of super minion-empowered waves, so we’re bringing inhibitor respawn times down to match. We’re also tweaking super minion resistances to give both types of damage threats the same chance to kill them.
Twisted Treeline
Super minion armor decreased, magic resist increased.
After playing with buffed super minions on TT we realized they are not quite tuned to 3 people so we’re tweaking their values so everybody can effectively kill them.
Super minions
Pulsefire Ezreal Update
The adventurous time-law fugitive now has newly-upgraded specs. Learn more about his update.
- Updated VO
- Updated basic attack animations
- Updated VFX
- Updated texture for all four forms
- new recall animation
- new homeguard animation
Crowd Control Display
As a follow up from the last patch, we’re adding Polymorph and Grounded to the crowd control display table! More to come soon.
Unanimous Surrender at 15
Now live on all non-RGM queues, you can surrender at 15 minutes with a unanimous team vote.
Ping Muting
The new ping-mute button axes standard pings, smart pings, and the newer HUD pings. The old mute-chat button is still there, and still mutes chat as well as extracurricular animations (/d) and emotes (ctrl+6).
Rotating Game Mode
Claim the incredible power of Ascension to conquer the Crystal Scar of Shurima. Ascension is now live from 19/5/17 08:00 BST - 5/23/17 12:00 BST and 26/5/17 08:00 BST - 30/5/17 12:00 BST.
Check out this Ascension post for more details on the rotating game mode. For those who just need a TL;DR:
- Go 5v5 to claim the incredible power of Ascension by taking down Ancient Ascendant Xerath. Use Ascension to conquer the Crystal Scar of Shurima.
- First team to reach 200 points wins. Score:
- 1 point for champion kills.
- 3 points for capturing a Shuriman relic.
- 5 points for landing the killing blow on an Ascended champion.
- 2 points for each kill you acquire while Ascended.
Go forth. Conquer. Ascend.
League Client Update
We retired the legacy client in many regions and over the next two weeks we’ll be completing the roll out of the new client.
You can find solutions to most common issues in the Known Issues section of our support site.
New features
Notable Fixes
- Fixed custom game lobbies showing the incorrect highest rank between game modes.
- Fixed visual bug where players would sometimes see two party captains in a lobby after the original captain had left.
- Fixed a bug where players couldn’t accept invites after the sender entered queue, or saw the summoner name display as “...”
- QUIT button in the lobby has been replaced with X.
Your Shop
Your Shop now works in the updated client and will have a grand re-opening to celebrate. For those not familiar with Your Shop:
- The thoughtful Discountbot selects six skins that it thinks you’ll like and offers them at varying discounts. Beep boop.
- These discounts may include Legacy skins not currently available in the store
- If you receive a skin discount on a champion you don’t own, Your Shop will offer the champion and skin together as a bundle, with the same discount applied to both items
- If you buy the champion individually through the store for no discount, Your Shop will automatically remove it from the bundle and offer the skin on its own
- Ultimate, Legendary, Limited, Loot-exclusive, and relatively new skins (released in the last 3 months) will not be featured in Your Shop
Your Shop will be open from 5/18/17 at 20:00 BST until 07/06/17 at 07:59 BST .
Queue Health Update
- What does this update mean?
Solo/Duo Queue
Ranked Flex
Bugfixes
- Vi’s Assault and Battery will no longer carry her into the enemy fountain if her target Recalls during the travel time
- The tooltip for Sterak's Gage has been updated to clarify that the buff from Sterak's Fury lasts 8 seconds, but the shield from Lifeline only lasts 3 seconds
- Gragas's Body Slam no longer rarely passes through targets standing next to terrain
- Fixed a visual bug causing Lucian's Piercing Light to not display its cooldown after firing if the initial target became untargetable or invulnerable durign the cast animation
- Enemies no longer lose spell shields when walking through the very edge of Yasuo's Wind Wall
- Ahri's Fox-Fire wisps and Diana's Pale Cascade orbs no longer visually linger in their last known location when Ahri and Diana enter Fog of War
- Fixed a bug where mini Krugs sometimes died instantly
- Chain Vest no longer shows Guardian Angel as one of its upgrades
- SKT T1 Ryze’s broccoli is now properly centered during his recall animation
Upcoming Skins & Chromas
The following skins and chromas will be released during patch 7.10:
Pulsefire Caitlyn
Brolaf
Headhunter Rengar
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