$ cat lol/patch/26.11
87 changes. Source: official patch notes.
Buffing the Role Quest reward as a minor follow up on the change in 26.9. We felt this reward landed a bit soft, but we think it does good things for the shape of the game by allowing mid laners their own special form of scaling.
Summon Aery's early game defensive output is being tapped down a bit so lane trades can stick onto enchanter duos a bit better.
We're buffing Aftershock's early game output a bit so aggressive users can better trade with their opponents.
And finally, we are buffing Guardian's cooldown and adjusting how it scales to help tankier users who need it to survive the laning phase.
As a pretty "behind the scenes" unique that most of us just expect to work, Dream Maker is getting a mix of adjustments to help it perform in a more generally functional way that should pan out to be a nerf in most situations, but will definitely be a buff in others. Blue Bubble Damage Reduction is being adjusted from only affecting the literal first instance of damage (i.e. the first tick of a DoT, or the first instance of an on-hit damage from an incoming basic attack) to affecting the first cast source (i.e. the entire DoT, until it runs out of flat damage reduction.) Purple Bubble Damage is changing from mostly an on-hit effect to an on-hit or on-ability damage cast source effect with AoE penalties. (i.e. If Ezreal Ult triggers the Purple Bubble, it will apply to that entire Ezreal Ult but with reduced AoE efficacy. See Nami E for a similar example.)
Moonstone will no longer double dip in both heal / shield power and Grievous Wounds / Shield Reaver. This is mostly a nerf, but will occasionally be a net positive when opponents have Grievous Wounds / Shield Reaver. As a mathy example, this means that if you have 50% Heal / Shield Power, and heal one ally for 100 * 150% from Heal / Shield = 150, on 26.10 it would then bounce 150 * 30% * 150% = 67.5 healing to another ally, whereas now it will only bounce 150 * 30% = 45 healing.
An item that was completely bound to Nami because of outsized synergy with her E, Mandate is getting reworked to better fit into a niche for utility casters who want to help their team out with more crowd control rather than healing/shielding or personal damage. We look forward to seeing you figure out new optimal users!
A straightforward nerf for enchanters.
And a straightforwards buff for tanks.
For Knight's Vow, we're pushing the unique effect rather than generically buffing its stats or gold cost.
Zeke's is getting a QoL improvement for any users who might be casting their ultimate from long range—such as Leona and Nautilus.
Brand has been toeing the line in bot for a while now, and this patch has well and truly crossed over, so we're targeting that lane with a nerf to his base armor.
Diana's feeling a bit underwhelming in the jungle after her previous adjustments due to the Dusk and Dawn changes. So we're giving her a little more moon-power in the jungle to return her to her former glory.
Now that the dust has settled from 26.9's Dusk and Dawn reshape, we've uncovered that Ekko has room for a compensation buff as he is no longer completely bound to just buying that item for his power.
With the ranged minion aggro pull removed last patch, Heimerdinger mains ended up with some degraded functionality around how turret ranges interact with minion ranges—in the sense that ranged minions outrange Heimer's turrets and he had no way to pull them into their range. This makes for a pretty miserable experience where you just watch as your turrets tank minion autos without attacking back. Additionally, it was brought to our attention that his Evolution Turrets sometimes fail to follow up on his Storm Grenade when they lose vision of the target too quickly due to minor timing fluctuations around vision and turret logic, so we are increasing the vision duration slightly to resolve that.
Our Void Walker has been limping around the Rift more than blinking. Stackable tear items have provided an additional cool late-game fantasy option besides pure AP, but his early game has been tougher than usual (in part due to our mid quest adjustment). These changes should help his laning, both in farming and trading.
Quinngle (or Qungle [Kwun-gle]?) has been pretty popular and fun, even in a weak state. We know a lot of you will pick up more tricks and mastery over time, so for now we're just making sure her clear speed is more competitive without changing burst or dueling. This should help our trusty ranger more regularly undertake dangerous missions deep in enemy territory, whether she's looking for camps or champs.
The baby dragon has been absolutely blasting his opponents since getting his hands on Deathfire Touch. We've had to do an unfortunate number of micropatch nerfs back to back, and we are hopeful this will be the last one we need to do. Included in these changes are a continuation of the latest nerf's push towards bringing him back into primarily critical strike builds rather than just Essence Reaver into bruiser, which we think can sit stronger since at the end of the day, a squishier Smolder has more weaknesses to play around, like being burst by enemy spell rotations.
We'd love (fear) a world where Teemo could be equally happy building AP, on-hit, and AD for his new ratios, but as it stands, Shiv is ahead of the pack. By hitting his Toxic Shot AD ratio, we're confident Teemo with Shiv can land in a good spot without forcing those of you who like other builds (e.g. Nashor's, Liandry, Malignance) to rely on it. Additionally, hits to his scaling durability should preserve his lane bully identity, while increasing your chance of getting the jump on him!
While AP Xin builds are not OP per se, the sheer amount of healing has been eye popping in an extremely expectation breaking way. Tamping that down with some compensation in the form of sustained damage.
We like a world where Hexplate is satisfying across a spread of archetypes, and serves as a springboard to dive into interesting itemization tradeoffs. However, right now the item makes League less approachable for top laners by letting Vayne and Varus maintain a large proportion of their damage while being a good bit harder to kill. This change should better align expectations opponents have around ranged users building Hexplate, while still presenting as a worthy Experimental choice.
Heartsteel has slowly fallen out of favor. With Mundo meta out of the way though, we're going to revert a nerf from a year ago since we feel the item occupies a really cool (and important) aspect of greedy tank itemization.
Shiv has picked up a neat spread of users—we think it could use more love when it comes to some characters that are more reliant on AD, like Kalista or Kai'Sa. We'll keep monitoring satisfaction around the new shape of Statikk as Season 2 progresses (should lightning strike twice?)
We are also making an adjustment to Deathfire Touch so that it now only deals magic damage to resolve an extreme synergy with Black Cleaver.
Now has reduced effectiveness for 20 seconds after being healed
Now has reduced effectiveness for 8 seconds after being healed