Patch 9.23 and TFT Notes

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Table of Contents

• Patch 9.23 Notes
• TFT Patch Notes

SR Patch Notes

Check out the Patch 9.23 notes for the most recent changes (be sure to check regional editions for slight variations!) 

"Welcome to preseason! Hope you're ready for some big shake-ups to Summoner's Rift, expansions and overhauls to multiple item systems, and major work to a bunch of keystones. In many respects this is our most ambitious preseason in years, and we're excited to see what new picks and strategies develop in a world where the map itself changes during the game. As usual, the next couple of months will be all about establishing and stabilizing the new meta as we head toward season start, so now's the time to jump in if you want to be ahead of the curve when ranked kicks off in the new year. 

On the ranked note, if you're looking to scratch your competitive itch, TFT's ranked season starts this patch. Warp on over to the Teamfight Tactics patch notes to get up to speed with what's going on in the Convergence. 

Best of luck in both your preseason matches and in making it through this wall of patch notes!"

 Paul "Aether" Perscheid

[Full Patch 9.23 Patch Notes here!]

Here's a few quick blurbs regarding the distribution of the end of season rewards, the upcoming Twisted Treeline rewards, and the return of the Blue Essence emporium on November 25th!

New Skins

Three new skins will be available this cycle:

Pulsefire Thresh Prestige Edition

Chroma

A chroma for Victorious Aatrox will also be will be available as End of Season rewards:

New Summoner Icons

A new set of Champie summoner icons will be available through the upcoming Essence Emporium:

Ranked Reward Summoner Icons

Emotes

Several emotes will be available as End of Season rewards:

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!"

Miscellaneous

• New skinlines and bios will be updated this patch:
• Skinlines:
• Cops and Robbers
• Crimson Elite
• Dreadknights
• Bios:
• Pulsefire Thresh: "As head of the Remembrancers, Thresh usually remains behind the scenes pulling the chains of time rather than stepping into the stream himself. Yet recent events have caused him to leave his temporal citadel, bringing his pulsefire lantern to bear."
• Pulsefire Thresh Prestige Edition: "As paradoxes multiply and more rogue agents rebel against the grasp of the chrono-enforcers, Thresh, as commander of the Rembrancers, takes matters into his own hands. He must not yield control of time to these interlopers... nor to the growing Praetorian threat."
• Victorious Aatrox: "Victorious Aatrox was awarded to players who reached Gold or higher in the 2019 season. With arm and sword sculpted from crystal quartz, he stands as a monument to all who wish to achieve greatness."
• Captain Volibear: "For Volibear's years of service on the Force, he was awarded the honorary title of Captain. For his utter incompetence in the field, it was made certain he would remain on desk duty for the rest of his career. Even so, he and Constable Trundle always end up patrolling the streets with mountains of paperwork left in their wake."
• Constable Trundle: "Constable Trundle's definition of keeping the peace translates to barking insults at jaywalkers, haphazardly placing cones in the street, and perhaps worst of all, plundering doughnuts from all the local bakeries. Needless to say, this behavior results in some very stern browbeatings from Piltover Yard."
• Dreadknight Nasus: "Dreadknight Nasus serves as keeper of the forgotten texts deep within the catacombs of his Master's labyrinthine library. It is said that within lies the secret of the Dreadknights' undoing, but no living soul has yet verified whether this is truth or fable."
• Dreadknight Garen: "Once a valiant hero, Dreadknight Garen fell to the promise of power great enough to save his land. Now, twisted by the corrupting magic of his Master, he commands the frozen legions in their march upon the living. Only desolation remains in his wake."
• Crimson Elite Talon: "The Crimson Elite cannot confirm or deny the existence of the agent known as Talon. The bloody trail left behind him serves as a sinister warning to all. Perhaps more disconcerting are the hundreds of undocumented cases that remain undiscovered."
• Crimson Elite Riven: "Though officially listed as killed in action, the rogue operative with the broken blade harbors no regrets for abandoning her comrades in their most dire moment. A turncoat become mercenary, she operates in the outer limits of civil society, lending her blade to the highest bidder."

"Greetings Tacticians! 

The big news this patch is the return of the ranked queue. On the balance front, we made a host of small changes and fixed a bunch of game-altering bugs. The method to our madness focuses on shifting some power into Tier 2 and Tier 3 three-star Champions while pulling some power from the stronger Tier 1 Champions. We’re glad we took the extra patch to get all of the new-set jitters out, but overall we’re really excited about the state of Rise of the Elements. There’s multiple paths to victory and each game plays out differently so good luck on your climb! 

Take this portal if you're looking for League's patch notes! 

Let's get into it! 

Blake "Riot Beernana" Edwards

[Full TFT Notes here!]