League Of Legends’ Next Patch Makes A Lot Of Big Changes

League Of Legends’ Next Patch Makes A Lot Of Big Changes

League of Legends patches are normally relatively minor incremental things at this point — tweaking an item or two, rebalancing a handful of characters, maybe dropping a few new skins in. Not this week. Riot’s 5.16 patch notes make it sound like a patch on steroids.

There’s a lot of ground to cover here, so I’m going to break the updates down into several bulleted sections. You can also watch the TL;DR patch notes, which is a regular video series produced by the popular League-focused YouTuber Blakinola:

Here’s a quick rundown of my own.

Juggernauts incoming.

As I previously reported, four different melee fighters in League are being reworked in an attempt to liven up their gameplay mechanics and make each of them feel unique and distinctive in their own special way. These changes to Garen, Darius, Skarner, and Mordekaiser were already live in League’s public beta, but now they’re stepping into the main game. Fans have been wary about some of the tweaks, many expressing particular concern with Mordekaiser’s rework. I suspect this won’t be the last time we hear from Riot about the new juggernauts.

You can read about the changes in more detail in my original post.

A bunch of defensive items are being nerfed.

In their continued efforts to migrate farther and farther away from the beeftacular age beefiness dominated by super beefy tank champions, Riot is nerfing a number of popular defensive in-game items in League. These nerfs are mostly being countered by one or more additional tweaks, however. The damage-reflecting armour Thornmail, for instance, will now cost more and reflect less damage back to the person attacking whoever’s wearing it, but it will also scale with the wearer’s armour to become more powerful over the course of a match:

TOTAL COST 2100 gold ⇒ 2300 gold

REFLECT DAMAGE 30% of the attack ⇒ 15% of the attack

NEW: REFLECT RATIO Now scales with 0.25 bonus armour

Randuin’s Omen, meanwhile, costs less but also provides less health and armour:

TOTAL COST 2850 gold ⇒ 2700 gold

HEALTH 500 ⇒ 400

ARMOUR 70 ⇒ 60

SLOW DURATION 2 (+0.5% bonus armour + 0.5% bonus magic resist) seconds ⇒ 4 seconds

NEW CRITICAL BLOCK Reduces incoming critical strike damage by 10%

The patch is also making a number of defensive items, namely magic resist items like Null-Magic Mantle and Spectre’s Cowl, a tad cheaper — likely to help counteract some of the effects of nerfing big-ticket armour items.

A whole lot of champions are being buffed.

Speaking of counteracting the defensive item nerfs, the 5.16 patch is also boosting the base stats for characters who are most likely to suffer from the changes. Eight different characters are getting slightly better armour growth — i.e., the rate by which their armour increases each time they level up in-game:

  • Blitzcrank
  • Braum
  • Leona
  • Nautilus
  • Taric
  • Rammus
  • Amumu
  • Tahm Kench

Alistar, Bard, and Thresh are all receiving similar boosts to their health growth as well.

There are a number of more robust character buffs than these small health and armour growth boosts, too. The popular but also very-hard-to-play-well blind monk warrior Lee Sin, for instance, now returns more energy than he already did when attacking bad guys thanks to a buff for his passive ability “flurry.” His super-powered kick “Dragon’s Rage” also deals an extra bit of damage based on a percentage (15, 18, then 21% as you level it up) of the target’s health.

Other buffs include:

  • LeBlanc’s missile speed for her W and R is faster.
  • Lissandra can now heal herself with her R.
  • Nasus has more range with his Q
  • Rammus deals more damage with his W.
  • Teemo’s mushrooms reveal enemies that are poisoned by them (for the duration of the poison).
  • Twitch’s Q costs less mana and his R does more damage late-game.
  • Tahm Kench now stuns enemies after swallowing them and spitting them back out.
  • Rumble’s R has a shorter cooldown.
  • Volibear now “explodes in lightning upon casting R.”
  • League’s resident gummy bear-esque creature Zac also got a big boost to his slingshot jump range, as seen here:

I should point out that there are also some minor nerfs in store for other champs. It wouldn’t be a League of Legends patch if there weren’t any nerfs!

  • Alistar’s headbutt travels slower.
  • Ahri’s passive heals for less.
  • Elise’s Q deals less percentage-based damage.
  • Kayle deals 5 less base attack damage.

There’s so much information to process in the 5.16 patch that I’d be lying if I tried to tell you that I knew what effect the update is going to have on the game once it goes live tomorrow. What’s particularly crazy is that Riot’s adding all these changes into the game with the World Championships barely two months away. Good luck adapting to all these changes in time, League of Legends pros. And remember to have fun, too!


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