League of Legends 25.20 Patch Preview Notes are here and include a handful of buffs, nerfs and adjustments. Check out the full patch notes for additional details from Riot (source).
Patch 25.20 Preview
Average Play Jungle Champions
–Briar, Voli, Warwick are receiving nerfs to some of their stat checky potential (Voli with his Cosmic build)
-In particular, Warwick players typically resonate more with being unkillable, being fast & hunting and damaging, so we’re taking power out of his damage instead of any of those attributes
-To add a bit more detail here about the mastery curve oriented changes, we’re buffing Malphite because a Malphite at 51% is weak, it’s not because he’s easy
-This is because new Malphite players perform very well on him compared to other champions, while his best players don’t perform that much better than his newer players
-So a Malphite when mastered sits at 53-4% winrate, but other top lane champions when mastered are sitting at 54-55%
–Malphite‘s newer players are performing around 49%, whereas other new players on top lane champions sit around 46-47%
-This just means that looking at a Malphite that’s 52% is still a bit weak, whereas a different top lane champion like Gangplank at 52% would be overpowered
–Fizz is another of these champions who’s a tad weak by mastery
-In higher levels of play, he has to play pretty reactively, waiting for level 3 spike and trying to get a 1-0 ability trade with E at level 1 (dodging a spell and landing E)
-We’re making some changes that make him more effective when actually getting to play in these early levels with W up (eg. QautoW or EautoW, etc.)
-If he is able to weave these autos in with the extra on-hit damage, he will be a bit more lethal
-Also if you haven’t tried the Blackfire build that’s been making its rounds recently, probably worth checking it out (he really benefits from the Haste and damage amp)
-Overall, ROA and similarly durable builds are in an OK spot overall
-We’re trying to strike the right balance for champions that have flexible options in particularly their Assassin matchups, (especially for regular play) feel about even for both sides
-In SoloQ, a lot of these immobile mage champions don’t feel like they have a ton of agency and can feel bad, so we think this is important for their play experience
-Whether you want to build Ludens, ROA, Seraphs, BFT and for each different skill bracket, they should all be good in certain situations
-Right now though, for Orianna, she doesn’t pay enough of a damage tradeoff when going these more durable builds
-These changes are aimed at having that spike where you don’t have much AP and relying on base damages in ROA builds feel like a larger tradeoff
-Last year, we nerfed Veigar‘s W which was a bit painful for some of his waveclear breakpoints in particular
-We’re giving him back this 10% ratio, especially on his rank 1 W to make those moments a little more palatable
-There was a lot of in-depth discussion on various Veigar builds and we’re not ruling out deeper work in the future, but for this patch, we’re going with something tried and tested
–Camille is one of the scaling 1v9 AD fighters that we think is pretty close to being viable in certain situations
-We’re giving a bit of a buff to some of her fallback and harass patterns in some of these matchups to let her get through lane a bit more reliably
-She’s already pretty good at dueling in the mid-game, so the armor growth doesn’t matter a ton at those points in the game and so we’re indexing her power more in the areas where she needs it
-I misspoke a bit yesterday about Graves changes; I meant to say that most Graves‘ go for these types of squishy no durability one shot builds (only Shieldbow on 4)
-We’re making some changes here to make the pure AD build a bit weaker and by extension make the Cleaver build, which is a bit tankier a bit stronger
-We’re not trying to kill the pure AD build, but make multiple ways of playing Graves more viable
Jungle Power
-This patch, we’re targeting a few junglers (and one flex) that are posting up really strong performances in regular play; Volibear, Warwick, Briar.
-These 3 are strong statchecks in regular play where spacing gameplay is harder to access, so we’re taking them down a bit.
–Pantheon was overnerfed last patch and it wasn’t our intention to remove him completely from the meta, so we’re looking to claw some of that back.
Mastery Curve Buffs
-Each of the other buffs in the list are aimed at champions that facially look statistically fine (typically >50% winrate), but are actually on the weaker side when taking into account their mastery curve
-Take for example Malphite; a champion who only grows 2-3% Winrate when fully mastered
-This typically manifests most strongly with champions who are quite performant on game 1, who don’t grow that much with high amounts of play, have a high “novice share” (people who are new to playing the champion) or all of them
-On the flip side here is Katarina, an interesting case study, who has a pretty steep mastery curve, while also having one of the highest expert shares (and therefore lower novice shares) in the game
-This pushes up her public Winrate required to be balanced, when taking these factors into account
-Most other champions with similarly steep mastery curves tend to have higher novice rates (which pulls their public Winrate down) while also having a pretty disastrously low game 1
–Graves has been going pretty much full lethality one shot builds for a while
-We’re looking at some adjustments here to correct his builds and open up some different types of more durable builds (within reason)
Pro
-With Pantheon and Poppy both nerfed, we expect Wukong to rise – We’re looking to bring him down to be closer to the rest of the frontrunners in Jungle as a result
-We’re seeing a lot of different meta reads going into Worlds and are interested to see how the clash of regions shakes up and not looking to change things dramatically
-So, we’re looking at adjustments to just 2 other champs
–Camille is a champion who’s just on the fringe of viability and we’re looking to give her a power neutral bump that helps some of the Pro attributes in an effort to increase viable options amongst scaling “1v9” AD fighters
-On the flip side, Azir is still looking too strong in Pro, but net nerfing him from his current state for regular play feels pretty bad.
-Instead, we’re looking for a power neutral change that shifts some power away from some of the Pro attributes to other parts of his kit to give him some more clear strengths and weaknesses that hopefully gives some power back to regular players in the process