Hi Summoners,
Welcome to patch 4.17, THE PATCH OF CHAMPION UPDATES. We don’t have a lot of high-level balance tweaks in the mix (small taps for Nidalee, Maokai, Tristana, and Talon), but there are some cool “pump up the unique!” changes for champs who may have been lacking in that category. Much in the vein of promoting more meaningful choices, our hope is that by giving champions like Garen and LeBlanc more uniqueness (like out-of-combat health regeneration or stealthy deception), they’ll be able to feel a little more interesting in their roles.
Speaking of meaningful choices, our two new gameplay updates (Viktor and Soraka) are also in 4.17, with both focused on creating a little more unique gameplay for their respective champion. For Soraka – what’s it mean to be League’s premiere healing / banana throwing champion? Or for Viktor – what, specifically, is a GLORIOUS EVOLUTION!? A lot of questions we can potentially answer in 4.17, so be sure to check out our new champion reveal pages for Soraka and Viktor.
Final note, we’re continuing to patch out bits and pieces of the updated Summoner’s Rift as we start polishing up on work. Once again, this doesn’t mean you’ll get to play on the updated Summoner’s Rift right now, but just that you won’t get hit by a mega-sized patch in the distant future. In anticipation of this, we’re also rolling out some updated character textures for older champions so they can still look good when their environments change.
And that’s all for now! Remember that the World Championships are happening right now, so head over to the lolesports.com page to keep up!
P.S. If you want even more discussion on today’s patch, be sure to check out the Patch Rundown at the end of the notes! Join MsPudding, Scarizard, Seb, and Scruffy as they talk about Soraka, Viktor, and the future of Champion Updates.
Chris “Pwyff” Tom
Champions
Viktor
Viktor has received a Gameplay and Texture Update, as well as a spiffy new splash! Check out the update article for all the details.
Cassiopeia
Some small buffs to Cass’s mana, Q’s damage scales better with AP, and E’s resetting its cooldowns correctly.
We know Cass isn’t doing great on the live environment, but we also want to make sure we don’t react too quickly as players are learning a champion and then that champion goes on to demolish everyone(*cough* Kassadin *cough*). Still, we can give Cass a little bump as we watch her being picked up. This might be a conversation we’ll revisit next patch!
General
Q – Noxious Blast
E – Twin Fang
Ezreal
We fixed some longstanding clunkiness with Pulsefire Ezreal’s animations in 4.16. Our bad on forgetting to list this in the last set of patch notes!
Pulsefire Ezreal
Garen
Garen’s going to be a lean, mean, health recovering machine.
Right now, Garen’s identity is centered on his ability to run at people in a threatening way and, since we have a few people who already do that, we decided to give him a more unique strength. These buffs are to really cement Garen as a tanky sword-dude who can shrug off most forms of poke damage – that is, if he can find windows of safety to recover (more reason to hide in that brush!). You might say this gives him more perseverance. You would be correct.
Passive – Perseverance
Heimerdinger
A player raised the concern that Heimerdinger (and Karma) had to casttwo spells when empowering abilities, thus ever-so-slightly delaying his ability to fight back in high-pressure situations. With this change, Heimer will be able to preemptively use Upgrade while crowd-controlled so he can immediately mash faces when he recovers. This is a repeat of the below context.
R – UPGRADE!!!
Karma
A player raised the concern that Karma (and Heimerdinger) had to casttwo spells when empowering abilities, thus ever-so-slightly delaying her ability to fight back in high-pressure situations. With this change, Karma will be able to preemptively use Mantra while crowd-controlled so she can immediately mash faces when she recovers. This is a repeat of the above context.
Q – Soulflare
R – Mantra
LeBlanc
LeBlanc’s mirror clone is more deceptive, as it spawns stealthed for a full second alongside LeBlanc, so LB can create more distance from her clone before re-appearing. W has a longer grace period to return. Brushy brushy.
Since we removed LeBlanc’s silence in patch 4.10, she hasn’t been in the best shape. Rather than buffing her damage (wouldn’t that be fun), we’re looking for healthier ways to give her some strength, like reinforcing her deceptive gameplay.
Passive – Mirror Image
W – Distortion
Maokai
Maokai’s currently running rampant in top lane, partially due to his ability to trade damage with most of the scrappy dudes he finds up there. Given Maokai’s R is already a strong defensive ability in a team fight, we realized it probably shouldn’t also have so much damage tied to it.
R – Vengeful Maelstrom
Miss Fortune
Strut is no longer broken by non-damaging crowd control effects, like Nasus’ Wither, Lulu’s Whimsy, or… the aura from Frozen Heart (sorry!).
Miss Fortune’s Strut was always meant to be broken by damage (and the tooltip says this) but, for some time now, Strut also considered non-damaging forms of crowd control to be valid ways to break (like Nasus’ Wither, Lulu’s Whimsy or… Frozen Heart’s aura (sorry!)). We’ve fixed that.
Passive – Strut
Nautilus
Nautilus can drag himself to player-created terrain.
We already did this with Vayne, Poppy, and Gnar, and realized Nautilus should probably be able to do the same (some players also let us know! Thanks!)
Q – Dredge Line
Nidalee
Nidalee’s basic attacks do less and she has less attack speed. Takedown scales less with AD and more with AP. Pounce now resets to a reduced cooldown if Nidalee pounces to a Hunted target (rather than swiping a Hunted target).
As a super strong lane bully, Nidalee’s able to poke down her opponents fairly quickly before mauling their face as a giant cat. While we think it’s cool that Nidalee has access to two completely different builds (AD and AP), it’s clear her AD build is a lot stronger, especially since she can put out tons of damage without needing to land a spear / trap. Our goal here is to bring a little parity between the two builds while also, honestly speaking, reducing some of Nidalee’s oppressive lane power when building AD.
General
Q – Takedown
W – Pounce
E – Swipe
Rammus
Just a small quality-of-life buff where if Rammus uses Powerball to cancel Defensive Ball Curl (or vice versa), he gets 1 second of buffs overlapping instead of immediately cancelling one for the other.
Q – Powerball
W – Defensive Ball Curl
Sona
While we were cleaning up some code with Sona, we accidentally reduced the cast range on her Hymn of Valor. We fixed it. Sorry!
Q – Hymn of Valor
Talon
Talon’s E no longer silences, it just applies a high-intensity mini-slow.
Now that other high-burst low-counterplay assassins have been modified in some way (hello LeBlanc), Talon’s one of the next dudes to step forward. Our focus with this change is not to entirely nerf Talon (although we realize this is a hit to his laning phase against certain champion matchups), rather, it’s to reduce frustration when playing against him. Specifically, Talon’s ability to obliterate a target of his choosing in the mid to late game without them having any say in the matter (literally) is a tough ability to balance around – especially as we’ve targeted other low-counterplay abilities like LeBlanc’s Sigil of Silence. As an aside, this does mean that the ability name Cutthroat makes no sense from a thematic perspective, but naming it cut-ankles was less inspiring. We’ll look into it.
Q – Noxian Diplomacy
E – Cutthroat
R – Shadow Assault
Tristana
As a hyper-scaling markswoman on par with champs like Koggles or Vayne, Tristana needs equivalent weaknesses for her high potential. Up front: this change won’t completely address that problem, but we did want to create more opportunities against Tristana in the early to mid game as we examine her power for the future.
R – Buster Shot
Yasuo
While this is a fairly innocuous bugfix for Yasuo, we wanted to take this opportunity to talk about everyone’s favorite wind swordsman (to ban). While we think Yasuo’s in a good spot in terms of his overarching gameplay and strategic fit, there’s a good chance he’s just a little strong for what he brings to the table. We’re currently examining ways to add more meaningful counterplay against Yasuo but just wanted to let you know we’re aware of his power.
Q – Steel Tempest
R – ChronoshiftMass Texture Rebalance (Part 1)
Over the next couple patches we’re taking a broad pass at the game’s older character textures with the goal of improving parity with newer releases and making sure everybody looks at home on the Rift as its style and color palette continue to evolve.
Ahri
- Base, Dynasty, Midnight
Akali
- Base, All-star, Blood Moon, Crimson, Nurse, Silverfang, Stinger
Ashe
- Base, Amethyst, Freljord, Sherwood Forest, Queen, Woad
Corki
- Base, Hot Rod, Ice Toboggan, Red Baron, UFO, Urfrider
Fiora
- Base, Royal Guard, Nightraven
Galio
- Base, Commando, Enchanted, Gatekeeper, Hextech
Graves
- Base, Jailbreak (for now)
LeBlanc
- Base, Prestigious, Mistletoe, Wicked
Leona
- Base, Defender, Iron Solari, Valkyrie
Nautilus
- Base, Abyssal, Subterranean
Orianna
- Base, Bladecraft, Gothic, Sewn Chaos
Xerath
- Base, Battlecast, Runeborn
Items
Elixir of Brilliance, Elixir of Fortitude, Ichor of Illumination, and Ichor of Rage
Elixirs and Ichors now intelligently scale up in stats as a character levels up with them on.
Before this patch, Elixirs and Ichors only did one “check” on your level before determining the stats they gave you. If you leveled up with an Elixir or Ichor used, however, they wouldn’t intelligently scale up to your new level. We fixed that.
Dominion
Respawn Mechanics
Dominion currently has a balancing mechanic where the losing team has a shorter respawn timer than the winning team. Unfortunately, this mechanic would come into play immediately after one team took a lead. We’ve increased that band by a wider margin so that close games don’t get so swingy but losing teams still have the potential to make a comeback.
Respawn Timers
Ranked Updates
Master Tier
When we implemented Master Tier, we removed clamping from Diamond 1. One side effect of this has been that players who ride win streaks into Master incur pretty harsh LP penalties if they fall back into Diamond. This new LP loss cap is meant to soften the experience while players strive to enter – and remain in – Master Tier.
Ranked Decay
Ranked decay is meant to ensure that only the best active players can hold on to their position through a season. While this makes sense for the most competitive tiers, it just ends up as source of stress for the rest of the ladder. To that end, we’ve removed decay for silver and gold (bronze was already immune – we fixed a bug where this wasn’t the case for promo series).
Ranked Duo Queue
Following a brief hiatus last patch due to a bug, we’re reactivating the limiter that prevents ranked players from duo queuing with partners more than one tier above or below them.
Ranked Restrictions
We recently posted about a few new measures coming to ranked play as part of our ongoing effort to encourage positive behavior.
Suggested Players
Bugfixes
- Nomad’s Medallion now properly shows up under the “Other Movement Items” category
- In line with previous fixes, Relic Shield and its upgrades no longer execute Shaco boxes
- Fixed a bug where Ichor of Illumination was removing cooldown reduction when it wore off
- Fixed a number of patcher crash issues
- Fixed an issue with multitouch scrolling in the Mac patcher
- Players no longer lose access to the patcher’s Repair tool after closing the menu via the ‘x’ button
Upcoming Skins
The following skins will be released at various times during patch 4.17:
