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
26.9 Closer look
– After being out for almost a year and a half, we’ve learnt a lot about Ambessa’s power curves, strengths and weaknesses, good and bad matchups, etc.
– One area we feel has slightly less counterplay than we think is long term healthy is Ambessa’s ult warning
– Given its long cast range, it often feels more missable (burden is on the caster) than dodgeable (counterplay for user)
– We played around with several timings and think this timing strikes the best balance between dodgeability, requirement to combo CC and still satisfaction for the Ambessa player
– The goals of these changes are to increase differentiation between the AP and AD builds
– Create satisfying incentives for Shyv players who want to be more of a durable Dragon, rather than a squishy burst champion
– It’s also been a common pain point that Shyv’s shield is both easily popped and having the Movespeed tied to that makes her play pattern quite binary and unsatisfying in the moment, so we’re making the Movespeed from W more consistent and available
– In the AD build, we’re looking to have the Q + W pattern be more supported, as she needs to stick onto targets more and be more durable (W cooldown should help here)
– In this build, we’re looking to balance the satisfaction of Q button presses and repeatedly attacking
– We’ve also added more incentives for her Sheen synergies with Trinity Force in particular by buffing her AD growth
– While she’s lost a few incentives to build AD overall, we intend to support the AD Bruiser oriented build as best as we can
– In the AP build, we’re looking to create stronger incentives for E to be maxed and play around E + W
– More of a fireball oriented in and out pattern
– We’ll continue to followup to ensure that Shyvana’s tuning supports her builds as they play out
– While Zeri has been statistically balanced in her more bursty form, especially across ranks, her satisfaction and identity have taken a hit
– These changes are aimed at trading off some of her damage output to re-emphasize her speed outputs (some of the main reasons players play her)
– Along with this are some feelsgood changes (like E refunding on attacks vs everything)
– While we’re increasing some of the speed on her ultimate, we’ll keep an eye on the stack dropoff duration to ensure it strikes the right balance of fantasy fulfilment and balanceability
Tahm Kench
See Highest Win Rate Tahm Kench Builds– We overnerfed Tahm Kench last patch; we intended to buff TK support overall and these buffs are more skewed there, though they will overall affect both roles
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.