Patch 25.12 Full Preview!
Starting the first of our MSI patches, MSI will be played on 25.13.
Meta is looking decent, not looking for big meta shakeups and not too many regions are playing on 25.12/25.13. Mostly looking for small touches as a result.
Top
- Rumble and Gwen have been reigning supreme in Top lane recently; tapping them down a little to make room for a few different picks
- Our Garen changes were pretty under-magnitude. Looking to further his AD incentives to make some of the more AD oriented fighter builds more viable. Our changes narrowed the gap from Cleaver to Phantom Dancer, but it's still a bit far off
- Our Aatrox changes also undershot a bit; so at least trying to put him back to where he was last patch
- Jax has lost a bit of relevance, just giving him a small bump up
- Morde is looking pretty weak and got indirectly nerfed from Liandrys, he also has a pretty shallow mastery curve, so giving him some power back
Jungle
- Lee Sin has fallen out of favor compared to a lot of the other AD junglers; especially in a more coordinated environment. Looking to carve out more of a strategic identity for him compared to the other AD fighters in particular. He is one of the few champions where him being a carry champ also buffs allies and we're leaning into that aspect
- Not looking to buff too many of the AP junglers going into the tournament as they can tend to take over, but Nidalee is weak for both SoloQ and Pro, so throwing her a bone
- Vi is still the most present jungler in the Pro meta, so we're looking to try and correct some of this moving into the tournament
- Finally Rammus, we're making some changes to make him more generically pickable. His identity compared to Malphite is more of a durable champ that goes fast and having him be too tied to armor is hurting his viability somewhat.
- He'll still benefit from building defensive and his taunt is still very good against auto attackers (because they'll damage themselves), but just a little less polarizing
Will chat about Mid/Bot/Supp tomorrow
Patch 25.S1.3
Mel
- After the hotfix, Mel has mostly stalled her winrate growth (similar to Neeko's release; another champ that has similar “play against” learning curve)
- We think her abilities are intuitive and will be learnt over time (drop the stacks, play around her W). We don’t feel the need to make further balance adjustments this patch and feel like she’s in a good spot while we observe how players learn her
- She’s currently extremely popular, which is great and we wanted to make her easy to play because of the influx of new/reviving players who wanted to play her from Arcane (hence the last hitting assistance, easy to use spells, etc.)
Support Items
- We’re trying to strike the right balance of appropriate support power level (and how that impacts ADC satisfaction) and not tanking the satisfaction of the role
- These nerfs are targeted at particularly the more damaging support items to decrease damage in the game. It’s not any higher than Season 14, but doesn’t mean it can’t go down a bit
- We’re still interested in longer term solves to increase ADC and Top agency and satisfaction in particular, but these changes will take a longer time to get right and land
Bounties
- We’re further reducing the value of bounties when a single player is trying to claw the game back while carrying on the losing team
Attack Speed Cap
- A small increase to the Attack Speed cap to 3.0; we don’t want to increase this too high as it makes piloting champions at high attack speed too challenging
- However, we need to balance this against the fantasy of systems (typically items) paying themselves off fully with high attack speed values that don’t (seemingly randomly) get capped
Dragon Souls
- A small rebalancing to the Dragon Souls. Cloud despite being perceived the weakest by the majority players is known as the most powerful by skilled players. Chemtech on the other hand is just underpowered across the board
Domination Tree
- In 25.S1.1, we removed a decent amount of Adaptive from the Domination tree through Eyeball collector. We’re compensating for this somewhat, but not all the way by buffing all of the Domination Keystones. We think it’s still valuable that these assassin style champions (in particular) can take other keystones, so in these cases (like Blue Kayn, Evelynn) we will also buff the champions to compensate for their total power level
Gripping with my cold hands with a strange light caught in my eyes and my shadow stretching out through all the things I left behind. It may be a long road, I will not give up and I will face the voices in my mind to finish what I have started. All the times I've had to fight.