Patch 3.9 - Patch Preview and Patch Notes

A common Corki complaint is that he feels extremely mana constrained by the cost of Phosphorus Bomb. However, after looking at his abilities, Phosphorus Bomb needs to be expensive to balance out its lack of counterplay. So we instead reduced the cost on some of his other spells to make mana less of a constraint overall.

We lowered the early game damage output Draven got from his passive since it wasn't adding much in terms of satisfying gameplay. Unfortunately, to get the numbers right, we realized we would need to reduce his passive damage to a point where it would be even less satisfying. We instead opted to rework Draven's passive altogether into something that reinforces his current gameplay, something so… Draven… even his opponents will feel begrudged to applaud: Welcome… to the League of Draven.

By increasing the cooldown on Jayce's Acceleration Gate, we can keep his Shock Blast + Acceleration Gate combo impactful while toning down his poke and disengage potential. In addition, since later in the game not every Shock Blast will be accelerated, we've increased the base speed of the ability to make it better as a standalone skillshot.

Yordle-made shurikens seemed a little too sharp and pointy, so we've tuned down some of Kennen's early game lane harass given how much teamfight potential he has.

LeBlanc's Mimic was less a decision point and more of a tool to one-shot someone with Sigil of Silence. These changes aim to make Mimic equally interesting with other skills. For one, Mimicked abilities will now deal their own base damage instead of amplifying the base spell. This means players will be able to use Mimic in more creative ways at level 6, rather than saving it for Sigil of Silence. Additionally, Sigil of Silence will now deal less damage up front but more damage on detonation in order to better promote LeBlanc's multi-skill interaction.

We've reduced the overall damage of Consume to prevent it from outsmiting Smite at rank one.

We're repositioning Flame Breath as a core tool for objective control and faster jungle clear, while also emphasizing its use as a “burn down” ability to be followed up with auto attacks against tankier fighters. We've also fixed a long-standing bug with Shyvana's Burnout where it wasn't scaling with attack damage while in Dragon form. This fix - along with her increased fury gains and reduced fury decay – will help her in late game teamfights. Lastly, we've moved the descriptions of her previous passive effects to their new ability tooltips to help centralize information.

We wanted to make it easier and more rewarding for Ziggs to use Satchel Charge offensively, whether by detonating it immediately or leaving it as a threat on the battlefield to zone opponents. We also wanted to make Satchel Charge noticeably easier to use for players with moderate to high latency.

By constantly shifting between forms as they move about the map, certain champions have been artificially accelerating their access to fully stacked Tear items (Muramana and Seraph's Embrace) without using their mana.

We've normalized the hit delay on a few spells that had slight discrepancies between when the spell was cast and when it would take effect.

In order to alleviate some of the gold pressure on supports as they push for vision dominance, we've made some changes to how the Oracle's buff works as well reworked the rewards for killing wards. First off, Oracle's Elixir no longer expires upon death, meaning players can be more aggressive with Oracle's, rather than just passively clear warded areas they know to be safe. Secondly, the gold from destroying a ward is now distributed between both the player who kills the ward AND the player who, whether through Oracle's or placing Vision wards, granted vision on that ward.

Tear of the Goddess and Manamune were stacking up far too quickly given their low cost, so we've increased the cooldown per charge. On the other hand, Archangel's Staff is a top tier item and requires a higher gold investment, so we wanted to reward players who choose to invest in charging their Archangel's Staff faster.

Previously, champions whose attacks applied a secondary source of physical damage (we're looking at you Jarvan), could unintentionally gain additional stacks of Black Cleaver's shred with one hit. Characters like Shyvana or Renekton that can apply multiple basic attacks at the same time will still stack up shreds as normal.

We've made Maw of Malmortius' passive bonus easier to understand at a glance. Now Maw will grant its maximum AD when the shield procs, so players will know exactly when they're at peak power.

We've made some changes to death streaks in order to address strategies where repeatedly dying to lower your kill bounty could be used to gain an advantage. We know this may affect games where people are not intentionally dying, and we'll continue to monitor this.

With Patch 3.9, we are setting a new precedent by making separate, map-specific balance changes to certain champions. The intent is not to reach a balancing cadence similar to Summoner's Rift, but to address some egregious balance outliers to improve the overall player experience. In this patch we're toning down Kassadin on Crystal Scar and Singed on Twisted Treeline. If this approach proves successful we'll follow suit with additional tweaks where necessary.

We worked with the Player Behavior team on a smaller change to remove all latency (ping) displays except your own. After looking closely at the data, it seems that showing pings during loading can add toxicity to games before they even begin. Ultimately we came to the conclusion that removing the ping display on champion load screens would lead to a healthier community overall, so we acted on it.