Patch 5.14 Notes

Gangplank

Gangplank, the Saltwater Scourge, will be updated with the launch of 5.14. Head to his update article for details on his new look and kit!

Miss Fortune

Miss Fortune's been updated! Head to her update article for a preview of her new visuals and check below for details on her balance updates.

General

Q - Double Up

W - Impure Shots

E - Make It Rain

Ahri

Charm always had a weird interaction with Monsters. Maybe they're shy? Maybe they're not used to the attention? Whatever the case may be, we don't want Ahri players to worry about resetting or 'bugging out' a camp while charming, so we've fixed that to make it easier when grabbing a buff or otherwise casually feasting on the essence of your friendly jungle monsters.

E - Charm

Azir

THE CONTEXT IS GIVEN. True to his nature as emperor, Azir has a habit of making everything about himself. Specifically in professional play where his massive range of threat and ability to single-handedly control battles of any shape or size necessitates the game be played around him. From champion select to laning to teamfights, Azir's dominating position makes it difficult for his enemies to interact.

Our changes this patch are all in the name of giving his opponents a way to play around Azir's almost impenetrable posturing. The approach here is twofold; removing his ability to turn the tables onto assassins and divers alike broadens his champion-specific counter-picks, while shuffling around his Attack Speed to ensure his explosive mid-game is kept down for a little longer before his ascendancy to god-hood takes hold.

Passive - Shurima's Legacy

W - Arise!

E - Shifting Sands

Darius

Apprehend now gives vision to help you react to the things you grab (particularly over walls), or to show you just how far off you were. This'll give you and your allies a little more time to pounce on the unlucky carries you drag in - or more time to jump away in fear if your haul yields an Amumu to the middle of your team.

E - Apprehend

Ekko

While not the darkest timeline, we've arrived in a place where Ekko's much weaker in his intended role than we'd like. Basically, building tons of damage and smacking people into the next season's not as rewarding as grabbing a Cinderhulk and CC'ing entire teams with impunity. While we're not directly addressing that here, we're first looking to bring up the baseline level of power for Ekko's DPS builds before evaluating how (if at all!) to bring Tank Ekko in line.

Q - Timewinder

E - Phase Dive

Elise

We'll be up front here: Elise has proven a challenge for us to balance for quite some time - both during her meteoric rise to the top of the jungle food-chain and dominance for two seasons, as well as her absence so far in 2015. At first, we poked around at making a number of feel improvements and quality of life fixes for some of Elise's more awkward cases, but after patches of very little movement it's become pretty clear that the spider queen just isn't succeeding at doing her job.

So let's talk more about that. What is Elise's "job"? Amidst the toolbox of tricks and mechanics within her kit overall, she's an early-pressure jungler that punishes mistakes and poor positioning. When working, she instills fear into her opponents at the thought of setting up ganks or taking objectives without the proper vision and awareness and can turn the tide of a game off of a single cocoon. This patch we're 'ripping the band-aid off', so to speak. Letting her access more of her signature pick-potential as well as more follow-up from her spiderlings in combat, Elise can finally start to secure kills and map control in the dominating fashion many of her subjects have come to expect.

E - Cocoon

R - Spider Form

Evelynn

Eve's changes in 5.7 certainly hit the mark of making her earlygame skirmishes pack more of a stiletto-wielding wallop, but they've pushed her too far into 'murdering everyone relentlessly' territory. We're keeping the early damage changes so she doesn't return to the darkness indefinitely, but trading some of her solo-kill power for stronger catch potential, especially when backed up by a team.

Q - Hate Spike

R - Agony's Embrace

Kalista

General

Q - Pierce

W - Sentinel

Rumble

Over 3 years ago, Rumble's Flamespitter that changed it to apply damage-over-time effect to give him greater control of his harassment tool, especially when turning or stuck in minion waves. While this greatly improved Rumble's usability, it also functionally increased his DPS by 33% on his highest damage ability. Needless to say, this was a pretty big deal.

So what's that history lesson got to do with 5.14? Well, the downsides of making a DoT were some weird cases where people thought they could escape the 'last tick' of Flamespitter, blowing flashes or movement abilities at the last second only to die a fiery death. We're still investigating if Rumble might heavier changes as a result of 5.13's AP Refactor (we'll get back to you on that), but cleaning up some edge-cases and removing traps keep his counterplay where we'd like it to be.

Q - Flamespitter

R - The Equalizer

Ryze

Not much to see here, just toning down Ryze's damage in a few areas, particularly his early-game spikes in the laning phase. We still view Ryze as a hyper-carry that needs team support to make it to his ultra-rapid-fire lategame, but the compensation buffs we gave him for removing the 'Perma-Root' in 5.12 went too far in making him self sufficient. Hypercarries without any exploitable windows are no bueno, so we're ensuring Ryze has the appropriate amount of risk for the reward you get for letting him reach his super-charged, spell-slingin' slaughter-state.

Passive - Arcane Mastery

Q - Overload

E - Spell Flux

Tahm Kench

League's newest river devil's bitten off a bit more than he can chew with early performances pointing towards the weaker side of the spectrum. This shouldn't be too hard to swallow - as a new champion with lots of utility loaded into interacting with allies, players need to get a taste for playing with and against Kench before we'll see his true power emerge.

All that said, we're tossing Tahmmy Boy a few crumbs to help him when he's falling behind. Some better trades in lane and more opportunities to test the waters with his powerful Teamwork-Teleport should help gauge if he needs a little more cook-time before devouring to his over-sized heart's content.

Q - Tongue Lash

R - Abyssal Voyage

Vayne

Not much here other than some re-tuning to Tumble's responsiveness. We're not sure how much this actually helps, but ideally you should feel better about rolling around and shooting folks with your crossbow. Enjoy!

Q - Tumble

Yasuo

Yasuo's Whirlwind wasn't working the same as the other two casts of Steel Tempest. So we fixed it! Have fun using a tornado to set your enemies on fire.

Q - Steel Tempest

Hunter's Machete

Riot Games: helping mages with their early clears since 5.14. While Runeglaive unlocks a lot of potential for mage junglers in the mid game (with these changes, RG will probably trivialise the jungle post-purchase, but that's a Good Thing), we've heard your feedback that those mage junglers have to get there in the first place.

It's worth highlighting here: that's not +1 mana per 5 seconds, that's +1 mana per second, which is actually a significant buff for mana-hungry junglers in the early game. This has the secondary effect of also buffing other spell-based junglers like Pantheon and Wukong, which is also something we're looking forward to.

Enchantment - Runeglaive

Ah, Runeglaive. Let's talk about the things you do. Our goals with Runeglaive (unlocking mage junglers) are still the same, but we're taking a different approach. First, while we're not directly opposed to laners picking up jungle items, we still need to see these items primarily used in the jungle so we can have a real understanding if they're accomplishing their intended goals. By pushing Runeglaive's power back into its jungle clearing speed (along with the machete buffs above), we can get a better assessment of what this item's doing for mage junglers, and then we can adjust accordingly.

On the topic of the changes themselves: while this certainly reduces Runeglaive's PvP combat power, our decision to push its damage onto monster camps also highlights an important place for Mage junglers to exist: clearing their camps quickly so they can be scrapping on the map. In other words, this RG should unlock more map presence for mage junglers, not so much just being a raw damage power spike.

Zeke's Harbinger

Excuse me, do you have a moment to talk about auras?

In trying to balance auras, not only do you have to account for the super-strong case (five friends stacked up together) but, on the flip side, you've also got to be thinking about the times when it's just you and a buddy. Keeping an aura balanced for both cases is often a difficult challenge and, even if we can solve for that, usually leaves us wondering how to add satisfying gameplay beyond… an aura. This was the first reason we decided to take on a Zeke's Herald remodel when bringing more support itemization to the scene.

Second topic: let's get some goals in here! We wanted to build a high-impact “let's get some hurt in the mix" item that still identified itself as a support tool. Like how Mikael's is the item you buy when you know there's one mate you need to protect, Zeke's Harbinger should be the aggressive counterpart for when you want to smack some faces. As an additional goal here, we really wanted to amp up the satisfaction for the support - something that the old Zeke's Herald suffered from (unless you really liked auras, we won't deny that).

Third topic (whew this is getting long): why not just make a new item and leave Zeke's in? We very lightly poked this topic with Runeglaive but might as well address it now. Beyond the issue of leaving an extremely difficult to balance item in the game (particularly one that is relatively weak until the ‘right' team comp taps into it [and then it becomes very, very strong]), when something becomes so niche in its optimal use it can quickly become a trap item for players believing all items (and item premiums) were created equal. We do want to support the ability for players to make smart, contextualised decisions based on the state of the game, but can't do so by leaving really specialised things lying around. Instead, our hope is to either focus an item so that it becomes a clear choice for a broad enough set of champions (see: Black Cleaver) or we can normalise and push out a wider swathe of options that are actually supportive of Good Decisions (see: our ability power item changes).