Greetings, Summoners, Welcome to patch 8. We've changed our patch cycle to alternate between larger game updates and shorter balance tweaks. First, we're looking into mage itemization, and there's been a minor overhaul on those items. Mages often have fixed build paths, so we wanted to give them new items—and revamp the old ones—to create more choice overall. After that, let's go top lane. We've seen a few top laners make the laning phase too consistent with sustain or base damage: Most champions can't fight them, and they can just avoid the ones who can. We want to make a more variant top lane, so we're addressing those outliers and working to make a more satisfying experience overall. Finally, we're pushing some big changes to a few champions we think require the gameplay changes. There's Zoe, Rengar, and Volibear, plus some smaller patch 8 4 league of legends mixed in. Dig into the patch notes now so you're prepared to hop onto the Rift when the patch hits live. After that, buy the best general damage items Void Staff and Liandry's. We want to give mages more options, so we're creating new mage items and reshaping old ones to provide more unique and focused outputs and let mages adapt their itemization to game states, matchups, and personal style. Lost Chapter, with its mana restore, is a nice item for mages who want to sustain in lane, which makes it a good starting point for most mid laners. As such, one of the first choices we want mages to be able to make is what item to build out of Lost Chapter. More on each of those below. Catalyst of Aeons and its upgrades remain good items for the laner who wants to sustain in lane, trading cooldown reduction for health. Liandry's Torment was a bit of a contradiction: The percent health damage made it decent against tanks, while the flat magic penetration made it decent against squishy targets. As a result, it either didn't do either job exceptionally, or it ended up overtuned, and doing both jobs too well. We're shifting Liandry's Torment into being the tank bleeding item, and rewarding champions who want to stay in combat for a while, casting spell after spell on the beefy boys. At the moment, too many champions Gangplank and Ornn are definitely core offendersare coasting their way through laning phase without needing to interact with their opposing laner. We're toning down the health and mana sustain of some of those picks, as well as weakening their ability to live in top lane from a safe range. Patch 8 4 league of legends also giving some love to the champions who tend to beat them so they'll be less safe of picks overall. There are also changes to Press The Attack, and be sure to check out the Jungle section for a change to Blast Cones which will impact top lane. Gnars who stay back and play safe should be less impactful, while those who get up close with the enemy should have more power, especially early on. Tanks aren't typically bad at dueling, but their cooldown gating and burstier damage outputs tend to give fighters clear chances to fight them and win. Ornn's windows of weakness are too short, whether that's the cooldown on W or the duration of the Brittle debuff. Even when he is fought outside of those windows, the damage from Searing Charge is too much for many champions to handle. We're also changing the way Sentinel's Oathsworn bonuses work, and this one's a little bit of a deep dive. Gaining or losing attack speed such as when her Oathsworn enters or leaves range can make a champion feel choppy, leading to flubbed last-hitting and stutter-stepping. On Kalista, whose attack speed also controls movement, losing or gaining attack speed is even more disruptive. As such, we're changing the bonus she gets from being near her Oathsworn away from attack speed and into attack damage, and changing her base stat profile accordingly. Base Stats We like much of the Rengar update, but the old Q paradigm is one Rengar players enjoyed more and opponents don't really notice that much. We want to keep—and amplify—the gains of the new ultimate while we're at it, and we're taking a pass at Rengar's stat profile to help Trinity Force be a more reasonable purchase. Base Stats With one patch under the belts of Swain players, we're mostly pleased with how players are learning. That being said, we have room for some feel-good changes which should help new players with the flow of his kit. In the meantime, we wanted to try our hand at giving him more complex decisions to make in game. With the power increase PtA is getting see belowand everybody's favorite Seneschal needs to lose some base power as a result. Also cleaning up some weirdness on short-ranged casts of Audacious Charge and making Wind Becomes Lightning more fluid. This makes Zed players feel worse about trying to make plays, knowing that if they fail, they'll be without a key cooldown for so long. First, Zoe's wave clear is good enough to frequently shove her lane in and roam—punishing the enemy mid laner with heavy poke damage if they try to follow. We're making wave clear one of Zoe's most notable weaknesses, meaning she'll have fewer opportunities to make use of her anti-champion strengths. Zoe's also getting to Sleep far too many targets, especially in teamfights where she's almost guaranteed to get her E cooldown reduction. Taking that refund away—and giving opponents better ways to remove Sleep—makes Sleep feel less unavoidable and brings her overall damage output down. Landing sleep into a long-ranged Q is Zoe's signature combo and her largest source of damagebut even unsleeped targets are losing most of their health to one hit once Zoe has a few items. We're moving some damage into More Sparkles. That's a lot of nerfs, and while Zoe is frustrating to play against, her win rate numbers aren't reassuring. This isn't an even swap: we expect Zoe to land on the weak side when 8. But we'd rather hit as many frustration points as we can in one go and address power later, rather than continuing to draw the process out. Base Stats Ancient Coin and its upgrades aren't doing as well as the other gold income items. In particular, they just don't offer much during the laning phase. Before, their quest reward was pulling some of that weight, but with that gone it needs something to make it worthwhile early on. By the way, there's currently a bug where the gold gained from Ancient Coin's pickups is not being reflected in the tooltip which tracks how much gold the item has accrued, but you still have the gold. Press The Attack isn't pulling its weight on melee bruisers. We've been pretty hesitant to buff it, thanks to its laning strength in duo lanes where the patch 8 4 league of legends amp has two champions worth of damage to apply to. We're pulling back on the amp at early levels so that we can put more raw damage into the keystone.
