11/5 PBE Update: Pulsefire Thresh, Victorious Aatrox, & more!

The PBE has been updated! As we take the lantern into the 9.23 PBE cycle, today's update includes new Pulsefire Thresh and Victorious Aatrox skins, new icons & emotes, and more!
Continue reading for more information!

Table of Contents

• New Skins
• Victorious Aatrox
• Pulsefire Thresh
• Chroma
• Summoner Icons
• Emotes
• Preseason 2020: Rise of the Elements
• Balance Changes
• Context & Notes

New Skins

Two new skins are now on the PBE!



Here's Riot grumbojr with a bugs & feedback thread for Victorious Aatrox:

"Greetings friends! 

Victorious Aatrox has emerged from the battlefield and is parading his way onto the Rift, featuring:

• New model and texture! - A fitting outfit for the new victor.
• New particles! - Dazzling golds and many laurels.
• New recall SFX! - Hear him sunder the earth with his blade.
• New recall animation! - The champion deserves a statue.

Victorious Aatrox is live on PBE! If you’ve got feedback, we’d love to hear it. Bugs? 

Send them our way and we’ll take care of them. We’ll do our best to answer your questions! 

Victorious Aatrox is attainable only by ending the season in Gold or above in ranked in Season 9."

Here's Riot 6armedrobot with a bugs & feedback thread for Pulsefire Thresh:

"A deranged time traveler from the future, Thresh is here to spread chaos and death! 

Pulsefire Thresh brings his corruption to the Rift featuring: 

• New models and textures to fuel his power!
• New VFX to gather the souls of his enemies!
• New SFX to inspire dread!
• New recall animation! Watch Thresh tear through the fabric of existence! 

Pulsefire Thresh is now available to play on PBE! Remember to report back here with any bugs or feedback. And of course, if you have any questions, I’ll do my best to answer them. Cheers! 

Pulsefire Thresh is set to be 1350 RP. 

*Prices on PBE are subject to change."

Chroma

A chroma for Victorious Aatrox is also on the PBE:

New Summoner Icons

A new set of Champie summoner icons are now on the PBE featuring Vi, Urgot, Jinx, and more!

Emotes

Several emotes are now on the PBE:

Preseason 2020: Rise of the Elements

"Welcome to Preseason 2020: Rise of the Elements! In our high-level goals blog, we revealed that this year’s preseason would be transformative but left the details hiding in the fog of war. Then we shared a video preview during the 10th Anniversary Edition of Riot Pls. And now, the full reveal is here. 

Elemental Rifts 

GOAL: Every game, Summoner's Rift presents a variety of distinct and memorable environments for players to master. 

Rise of the Elements will bring SR to life as the primal magic of the Elemental Drakes changes the landscape each game. The third drake transforms the Rift before it spawns and after that, its element will be the only one to spawn for the remainder of the game. 

Infernal Rift 

The Infernal Drake sunders the Rift, creating new pathways through buff camps and burning away their brush. In addition, the dragon pit itself becomes the Infernal Drake’s molten domain, crumbling the walls at the mouth of the pit. New paths make opportunities for a quick flank or sidestep that your opponent isn’t expecting. 

Ocean Rift 

The Ocean Drake brings new life to the Rift, causing existing brush to expand, fresh patches of brush to grow around the dragon pit, and the environment to flood with pools of water. In addition, Honeyfruit plants sprout up in each jungle quadrant. Sneak around the jungle or look for a new ambush opportunity. 

Cloud Rift 

The Cloud Drake’s power spawns air currents flowing through the jungle and dragon pit, speeding up champions in the vicinity. Dodge skillshots or make a swift collapse on your enemies trying to sneak a far away objective. 

Mountainous Rift 

The Mountain Drake triggers a seismic shift throughout the Rift. Bluffs of rock erupt from the earth, making for some scary new choke points and ambush locations, most notably across the mouth of the dragon pit itself. Extra tight spaces give opportunities for big AOE wombos and create some interesting new hiding spots with fog of war. 

We wanted to make sure the Elemental Rifts are fair to both teams regardless of whether one team is ahead on drakes. Keeping your head in the game if you fall behind early can be hard enough as-is; we didn't want to make it feel like the map itself was trying to make you lose, too. When creating new layouts for the Rifts, we wanted to make sure each of them would be as exciting and fair as the base SR map. Both teams have the opportunity to exploit and master the new terrain equally, so the outcomes are still in players' hands regardless of which Elemental Rift takes shape. 

Additionally, we wanted to ensure the Rifts feel intuitive, even in your first game. We avoided creating new gameplay mechanics in favor of expanding the SR elements you're already familiar with. We also made sure the changes always occur in the jungle near buff camps and dragon pit so that no matter which element you get, you'll interact with the layout changes around the same areas. 

Elemental Buffs & Dragon Souls 

GOAL: The elemental buffs are more equal in both satisfaction and strength. 

The Elemental Drakes themselves still grant different flavors of permanent, stacking buffs to your team when killed, but some buffs are now a little different.

• Infernal Might:
• Gain a percentage increase of Attack Damage and Ability Power.
• Oceanic Will:
• Regenerate a percentage of missing health every second.
• Cloudbringer’s Grace:
• Gain cooldown reduction for your Ultimate ability.
• Mountainous Vigor:
• Gain a percentage increase of Armor and Magic Resistance.

When a team kills their fourth Elemental Drake, instead of stacking their elemental buff, they'll gain a powerful Dragon Soul from the dominant dragon. Dragon Souls persist through death and last the remainder of the game.

• Infernal Dragon Soul:
• Every 3 seconds, your next attack or damaging spell creates a small AoE explosion, dealing adaptive damage that scales with bonus attack damage, ability power, and bonus health.
• Ocean Dragon Soul:
• Dealing any damage triggers strong health and resource regeneration for 3 seconds.
• Damage to minions provides less regeneration.
• Cloud Dragon Soul:
• Hitting enemies with abilities or attacks lowers the cooldowns of your base abilities.
• Mountain Dragon Soul:
• After not taking damage for 5 seconds, gain a shield that lasts until destroyed. The shield’s magnitude scales with bonus attack damage, ability power, and bonus health.

Once one team has claimed a Dragon Soul, it becomes the Elder Dragon's turn to defend the pit—this means only one team can have a Dragon Soul. 

Elder Dragon 

GOAL: Elder buff is more satisfying; Elder buff doesn't favor the team with more dragons. 

Elder Dragon still grants a powerful, short-term combat buff, and we're retooling it to offer teams who failed to claim a Dragon Soul a teamfight-focused hope of getting back into the game. To achieve this, we're removing Elder Dragon's scaling with Elemental Drake buffs (which favors the team that's ahead) and replacing it with a new execution component. If Elder's burn damage affects a low-health enemy champion, they’ll be consumed by a searing Elder Immolation—killing them instantly!

Enemies affected by the Elder burn have a small marker on their health bar, indicating the execution threshold. The execution has a brief wind-up, so with quick reactions, Immolation victims can avoid imminent execution with the usual suite of clutch save abilities or spells (Zhonya’s Hourglass, Kindred’s Ultimate, etc). The threat of Immolation will still be there when they become vulnerable again, so if the Elder buff burn is applied a second time, it’s back to the fountain! 

Side Lane Alcoves & Brush 

GOAL: The side lanes offer greater outplay opportunities by allowing players to turn fights through clever environmental play. 

Aside from the Elemental Rifts and other Dragon changes, we've made some renovations to other parts of Summoner’s Rift. We've created identical alcoves in top and bottom lane. Both alcoves feature three patches of brush on their outer edges and a small space in their center for champions to juke around or hide in. 

We don’t expect alcoves to be used constantly throughout lane phase. But every so often, players may turn a 2v3 into a double kill, or perhaps escape certain death due to the unique layout of an alcove. We look forward to seeing how players make use of them when they hit the Rift. 

Finally, there are two new patches of permanent brush opposite the Baron and Dragon pits. These open areas to the river are high traffic, but lack the map features that create playmaking possibilities. New brush opens up a lot of new strategic and tactical options. 

Other gameplay changes 

But it’s not all about the map! There’s a host of other new features and updates coming in preseason to address common frustration points in League. 

Jungle Path Diversity 

Early jungling currently revolves around Krugs due to their high gold/XP tuning, resulting in pretty one-dimensional pathing and a heavy blue-side advantage due to bot lane's proximity to Krugs. We're making XP and gold changes in order to open up more diverse pathing options and jungle strategies—most significantly, reducing Krugs' value and buffing Gromp's so junglers can hit level 3 off any combination of outer camp (Gromp or Krugs), buff camp, and any third camp. 

We’ve also added respawn timer icons (like you see on red and blue buff) to the minimap for every camp to help all junglers plan their next moves. 

Top Lane Influence 

For a high-stakes solo lane, top hasn’t been able to translate a lane win into an effective mid and late game carry for their team—particularly in higher levels of play. Combined with this preseason's increased focus on Elemental Drakes drawing fights to the bot lane, we're shifting power around to give top laners better opportunities to translate their wins in lane into game wins. 

We’re increasing base minion XP slightly so solo laners level a bit faster, and we’re reducing the amount of bonus XP generated when allies share XP so bot lane levels a bit more slowly. We're also slightly decreasing jungle XP. 

Additionally, to balance out the map objectives a bit, we’re spawning Rift Herald earlier in the game and allowing her to respawn once if she is killed early. 

Support Items 

We're refreshing support choices in the shop. They’ll be less poachable and have an expanded quest system that should be more satisfying overall. We're also reducing the current complexity and rules bloat of the lineup. 

Towards the goal of creating more satisfying items, supports will no longer have to upgrade these starter items in the shop. Instead, the quest system now automatically upgrades items to their second and third tiers when milestones are reached, with the Warding passive baked into those upgrades: 

• Tier 1 - Starting stats and gold generation passive
• Tier 2 - Stats improved, 3 wards added
• Tier 3 - Major stats upgrade, 4 ward capacity, gold generation passive removed

This unlocks supports to begin progressing toward their item builds without having to spend their first 1500g on completing their economy item. These starting support items won’t carry as many stats as before, but we think this is a fair tradeoff for the jump-start supports are getting on their other items. 

The four starting support item options are:

• High AD + Low HP + Spellthief’s passive
• High AP + Low HP + Spellthief’s passive
• Low AD + High HP + Targon's passive
• Low AP + High HP + Targon's passive
• (Coin removed) 

When assessing the play patterns of the income passives, Targon’s and Coin both encourage a safer, more sustain-focused playstyle compared to Spellthief’s aggressive one. To simplify the support item system, we’re removing Coin and allowing ranged champions to use the execute element of Targon’s passive. 

Finally, we're adding a new poaching rule that significantly reduces the gold you get from minions if you're farming them consistently. The tuning we want should still allow supports to secure a last-hit every now and then or even farm an occasional wave like today; the penalty only kicks in if item holders begin farming like non-supports. This new rule also allows us to remove the current anti-poaching mechanics on Spellthief's (charge pausing on CS, nearby ally requirement for gold). 

Lethality Items 

Lethality items are core for a pretty big group of AD assassins and fighters, but with only Duskblade and Ghostblade commonly used, choices feel limited. We want to make Edge of Night a more attractive option and add a fourth choice to the lineup: 

• Duskblade is mostly the same.
• Ghostblade is also mostly the same.
• Edge of Night's spellshield now works like Banshee's Veil, which is a more straightforward effect that avoids the learning curve of an active item while also allowing for clearer counterplay opportunities for opponents.
• Sanguine Blade is a new Lethality item that enables split pushing. Its unique passive grants a huge attack speed buff when no allies are nearby.
• We’re also exploring a few other potential lethality item options that you may see on PBE. 

Doubling the number of attractive Lethality items significantly increases assassins' ability to tailor their early builds to their matchup or game state, but we don't want to kill their later build variety by letting full-Lethality become optimal in every game. Individual items grant fewer stats but now feature a one- and two-piece bonus which preserves the power spikes of assassins' first big purchases. Since this set bonus stops at two, assassins should generally branch into raw-AD items like Guardian Angel or Black Cleaver after their two-item spike. Full Lethality should still feel like a strong option against exceptionally squishy comps, though. 

Other Items 

We're removing Spear of Shojin. Its unique passive when used by the most synergistic champions is lowering the downtime of some CC, mobility, and immunity spells beyond what we think leaves healthy room for counterplay. 

We’re also looking for other small improvements we can make across the item system from now through the launch of preseason. 

Keystone Rune changes

We’re tweaking some keystones to address a few problems they've created. 

Conqueror has been too effective at allowing sustained damage fighters to deal with tanks, who have lost their place in solo lanes as a result. We’re toning down the anti-tank nature of the rune by removing the true damage conversion and putting more power into the stacking adaptive force. 

Kleptomancy has been commonly used as a way to generate lots of gold in an uneven matchup, like ranged vs melee top lane. We’re pulling power out of the “farm gold off of my enemy” pattern and pushing more into the early game elixir drops. 

Aftershock continues to attract squishy champs looking to negate their intended fragility. We’re lowering the flat resistances more on this rune and buffing the power it gives to tankier champions. 

See you in 9.23! 

Exact numbers and whatnot for all the changes we've just shared will be available soon on the PBE for an extended four-week cycle. Rise of the Elements ships with patch 9.23 in November!"

Riot Scruffy also posted on the boards with more details, including some extra changes:

"Hey all, let’s begin this epic journey into season 10 with Rise of the Elements, preseason's gameplay component, on PBE today! We're keeping the changes on PBE for an extended 4 week period to iron out all of the bugs and polish that we can before patch 9.23. 

Go here for our original announcement blog with most of the details:
https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/news/game-updates/gameplay/preseason-2020-gameplay-rise-elements 

Some extra clarification
We think that the new dragon changes will probably push more power in to the bot/jungle side of the map, so with a combination of herald and XP changes, we’re aiming to put a bit more late game carry potential into the hands of top laners. 

Elemental drake spawns

• The first 3 drakes will always be unique.
• Ex. Ocean->Infernal->Mountain is possible but Ocean->Ocean->Infernal is not

Rift Herald buffs

• Spawn time 10 >>> 8 min
• Can respawn after 6 min
• Channel time to spawn the herald 4s >>> 1s

Minion XP changes

• 2% increase to solo lane XP and 2.4% decrease to duo lane XP
• Level 2 breakpoints are the same for both solo and duo lanes

Jungle XP changes

• Overall 4% decrease to xp, less if you're gaining catchup xp
• Krugs XP nerfed, Gromp XP buffed to make both sides of the jungle viable pathing choices
• Clearing any side of the jungle will get you level 3

Monster Buff VFX Updated

• We’ve got an updated version of Red, Blue, Baron, Elder, and the new Dragon Soul buff VFX in

Changes from our announcement
Cloud drake soul

• Announced: Reduce your cooldowns when hitting enemies with attacks or abilities.
• Updated: Gain a burst of Movement speed for 3s after using your ultimate
• The previous effect was pushing basic ability cooldowns too low in a way that felt similar to the reasons we decided to remove Spear of Shojin. Our new effect instead puts the power into a movement speed buff to also create more interesting uses on more champions.

Kleptomancy Rework

• We previously announced: Power siphoned out of gold procs and into elixirs to weaken the "farm my opponent" pattern, especially ranged vs melee.
• Updated: Klepto has been significantly reworked into a “mastery of all keystones” playstyle. You cycle between all of the keystones - they key is to use them effectively and quickly for max value.
• Gain a random keystone - once it is used gain another after 7 seconds.
• Includes - Lethal Tempo, Fleet Footwork, Aery, Comet, Phase Rush, Predator (only if you have boots), Electrocute, Hail of Blades, Grasp of the Undying, Glacial Augment
• Keystones cycle pseudo randomly - you cannot repeat a keystone for 5 rolls after it has been used
• Entering the fountain will reroll your current keystone

More preseason item changes
It's been a few months since we talked about our intent to clean up the item shop, and preseason is the time for those changes. As a reminder, we want to remove items that are (a) unhealthy, (b) too similar to another item, (c) very low usage rate, and/or (d) reducing the number of impactful decisions the item system offers. This'll free up space to add more items to the store, such as the new Sanguine Blade lethality item. 

Item removals
Zz’rot Portal

• This item has led to split push strategies that don’t involve enough champion interaction. We may revisit this type of strategic item in the future, but it would require more risk for the champion user to apply tower pressure.

Ohmwrecker

• This item has been underused and underpowered for a very long time. The tower disable effect is an interesting interaction that can exist in LoL, but it has been hard to balance in the item space because we would not be happy if we saw tower disable become a baseline on most team comps.

Raptor Cloak

• With no items to build into, we can clean this up.

Shurelya’s Reverie Reworked

• Shurelya's has had a hard time finding users and overlaps considerably with Righteous Glory. We want to try and shift it to enchanter stats to create a new option for supports and leave tanks with Righteous as an option.
• Updated Shurelia’s:
• Forbidden Idol + Crystalline Bracer + 850g (total cost 2300g)
• 300hp
• 10% CDR
• 100% health regen
• 100% mana regen
• 10% heal/shield power
• Active: 40% movement speed for 3s for you and nearby allies (90s cooldown)

Kircheis Shard buff

• This middle tier item has been quite underpowered and a bit of a trap to build early.
• Kircheis Shard damage 50 >>> 60
• Damage from Energized procs now stacks, rather than using the strongest one
• Stormrazor proc buffed from 50 to 60-80 based on level
• Statikk Shiv and RFC Energized proc reduced from 60-140 to 60-80

Coming Soon
Melee vs ranged lanes

• Primarily we want to make sure that we have mechanics to safeguard from ranged champions taking over top lane, which is the primary place where we get melee 1v1 matchups
• Current iterations have some additional melee only power added to Doran’s Shield 

Final icons for new items

• What you’re seeing are very early sketches, updates will be coming soon 

Stormrazor improvements

• We’re hoping to both improve the power of Stormrazor (as it’s only viable for 1 champ currently) and find ways to make it a more appealing item for more players. Should be some updates in the next week on this.

Tons of visual polish and performance improvements

• We are still finishing up all of the pieces for each elemental rift to make them feel unique and alive. Additionally in the final weeks we will be cleaning up a lot of stuff under the hood to make sure that there are no FPS drops or hitches with all of the new art.

A few more things still might be coming.

• We’re testing out a few other item changes and making sure that we have mechanics in place so that we can tune every position after launch if we need to adjust.

We hope you enjoy playing Rise of the Elements early and we would love to hear feedback or any issues you encounter in the wild. 

-The Summoner’s Rift Team

UPDATE 10/23
Presence of Mind Rune

• Ult CDR removed
• Still restores mana on takedown
• Restores 20% energy on takedown
• Grants 5 max energy or 35 max mana on takedown (up to 10 times)

Doran's Shield Update

• 80 Health
• 6 Hp5
• Basic attacks deal 5 extra damage to minions
• CHANGED: On taking single target attack or spell regenerate up to 40 (melee) 30 (ranged) health over 8s (live is 30 over 10s)

UPDATE 10/24
Jungle tuning iteration 2
After our first round of tuning we see that balancing Krugs and Gromp is going well but the balance between ganking and farming has been overly skewed towards ganking as priority. We want to open up more varied strategies for junglers and make the lost farm for ganking more substantial.

• Krug -> Gromp rebalance unchanged
• Non buff jungle camp respawns 2min 30s >>> 2 min
• Average camp gold / XP down by 5%
• Gold / XP per min for pure farm up by 12%"

UPDATE 10/29 - Energize ADC items 

Our goals here are

• Make Stormrazor a viable and more integrated item into ADC build options
• Simplify the energized system so that stacking or not is a clear and compelling choice
• Differentiate RFC and Statikk Shiv more

Energized

• All energized effects now stack

Statikk Shiv

• Energized damage 60-140 >>> 140
• All energized attacks chain to lightning targets

Rapid Fire Cannon

• Energized damage 60-140 >>> 50
• Range increase max 150 >>> 200
• Attack Speed 30 >>> 35%
• No longer increases energize charge speed

Stormrazor

• Cost 3100 >>> 3200
• AD 60 >>> 50
• Crit chance 0% >>> 25%
• AS unchanged
• Build path BF + Cloak of Agility + Kircheis Shard + 500
• Energized damage 50 (unchanged)
• Energized effects are increased by 35% >>> Charge Energize 35% faster

UPDATE 11/5 

Lethality Items

• Set bonuses removed - these were feeling more like punishment than bonus, so this iteration makes all of the lethality items standalone and choices should depend on their unique value
• Lethality item stats buffed (to compensate for lost set bonuses)
• New item added Umbral Blade - this item takes on the blackout passive from Duskblade and is a cheap utility focused niche
• Umbral Blade - 2400 total cost, Serated Dirk + 2 Long Swords, 50 AD + 10%CDR + 10 Lethality + Blackout passive
• Duskblade now has Grevious Wounds on the Nightstalker damage proc, and the blackout effect is removed to create a bit more context for when Duskblade is the right choice

Energize Items

• Some tuning on the individual items
• Zeal now builds out of Cloak of Agility instead of Brawlers Glove (total cost 1400g and now has 25% crit chance)
• Cloak of Agility crit chance 20% -> 25%
• Brawlers glove removed from the shop"

Ocean Rift:

Mountainous Rift:

Infernal Rift:

Cloud Rift:

Elder Dragon:

New Sidelanes:

Monster Buff VFX:

Context & Notes

1) Information on 2019 Ranked Rewards available in this post - Be Victorious 2019. You have before the clock strikes midnight on November 19 to get your ranked in for the season and earn rewards!

2) Riot Scruffy provided a Preseason update as the Preseason 2020 changes continue testing on the PBE this cycle:

"Preseason PBE update coming today. Changes mostly around Lethality and Energize items:"