The 26.9 patch preview for League of Legends is out. It’s a bigger patch this time around, as the game prepares for Season 2. While only six champions are being directly buffed or nerfed, there are lots of changes to other champions, systems, and much more. From @RiotPhroxon on X Source
Season 2 at a glance
When approaching 26.9, we were thinking a lot about systems and champion spaces that needed satisfaction, strategic distinction and also opportunities to create surface area for excitement and dreaming of what’s possible.
The first place we were looking was in enabling certain types of systemic gameplay patterns, where they were a little under the mark.
Starting Items
It’s been a long time since adding new starting items to the game!
- Doran’s Bow is an option in greedy lanes where you trade off health (and are more susceptible to burst), but if you have high uptime on an opponent
- Doran’s Helm is intended to be a situational choice (though some might be hardbound) for champions who don’t need the sustain from Doran’s Shield in lane
- We’re hoping that these changes allow players to eke out even more advantages in certain lanes and add a little more depth to laning interactions
Major Item Changes
Statikk Shiv
AD On-Hits have been languishing for a while and Statikk Shiv presented an opportunity to take an item that not many champions used and add some spice to it (the lightning applying on-hits)
Since some of the more eye-popping examples, we’ve made some changes to remove Staikk Shiv’s on-hit lightning also impacting the primary target (so it will only apply off th einitial attack
While it’s possible this may not be sustainable in the long term, pushing the frontier of innovation also carries some risk, so we want to see where it goes
We’re excited to see some interesting cooking and new builds!
Deathfire Touch, Stormraiders and Comet
- This philosophy also presented an opportunity within the keystone mastery system.
- Comet has been overloaded for a while, serving the DoT mage class, albeit poorly, and it also tries to compete with Aery on this axis.
- We saw an opportunity to bring back an old favorite in Deathfire Touch, and this archetype of poke champion is no longer so oppressive in the modern game.
- This allowed us to make a change to Comet to make it more about long-range poke, while also opening up Deathfire Touch as a more sustained option.
- We hope this differentiation allows the Keystones to play a more differentiated role.
- At the same time, Phase Rush has been hard to balance, especially for Control Mages who often use a few low-damage spell instances to run away and play a spacing game.
- We felt that the Design of Stormraider’s Surge was just superior to Phase Rush and represented the right level of commitment to allow the Movespeed to be powerful.
- Historically, we had to overly nerf Phase Rush to the point of being unsatisfying for the majority of the roster, while still being too good on the champs that could proc it too freely.