League of Legends is gearing up for another of its regular big content patches, and we’ve got all the info on 6.8 right here. It’s got a mass of new skins including the world championship ones, balance changes of course, the second half of the splash art overhaul – it’s even got that gorgeous, fabulous, outrageous Taric rework in it. This along with the usual huge amount of smaller tweaks present on the PBE. We’ve picked out the highlights below.
Update 18 Apr: We’ve added Taric’s Champion Spotlight video, so you can see what sort of thing to expect from the reworked LoL champion. We recently went hands-on with rejigged Taric and you can read about that at the handy link provided. The rate of updates on patch 6.8 have slowed down now, as the patch is nearing release.
LoL Patch 6.8 Balance Changes
Let’s start with the really important bit, shall we? What’s important to remember is that stuff on the PBE like this is neither guaranteed to happen, nor to be in the next patch even if it does. This is what the folks over at Riot are thinking about doing. We’ve got the numbers on what’s changing, and a general guideline on which way each champion, item, mastery, summoner spell or rune is moving.
Champions:
Ekko– nerfed
- Parallel Convergence (W):
- Passive base damage lowered to 3% missing HP from 5% missing HP
- Passive AP ratio increased to 1% per 33 AP from 1% per 50 AP
- Passive does minimum 15 damage to minions
- Phase Drive (E):
- Base damage lowered to 40/65/90/115/140 from 50/80/110/140/170
- AP ratio increased to .4 from .2
Galio– buffed
- Righteous Gust (E)
- Mana cost lowered to 60/65/70/75/80 from 70/75/80/85/90
- Movement Speed increase for allies reworked to 30/35/40/45/50% from 20/28/36/44/52%
Graves–changed
- New Destiny (Passive)
- AD Ratio on First hit lowered to 0.7 – 1.0 from 0.75 – 1.1
- Subsqeuent hits still deal 33% damage
- Crit Bullets lowered to 6 from 8
- Crit Bullet Spread lowered to a 15 degree angle from an 18 degree angle
- Added Critical Shot Bullets dealing 140% damage
Kog’maw– nerfed
- Caustic Spittle (Q):
- Armour and magic resistance shred increased to 20/22/24/26/28% from 12/16/20/24/28%
- Bio-Arcane Barrage (W):
- Base damage reduced to 4/8/12/16/20 from 10/15/20/25/30
Master Yi– nerfed
- Highlander (R):
- Cooldown increased to 85 at all ranks from 75 at all ranks
- Active’s duration lowered to 7 seconds from 10
- Kills and assists time extension increased to 7 seconds from 4 seconds
Miss Fortune– buffed
- Strut (W):
- Attack Speed duration increased to 4 seconds from 3 seconds.
- Cooldown increased to 12 seconds from 8 seconds
- Cooldown starts when ability is cast rather than when buff expires.
- No longer extends duration by applying Love Tap but…
- While Strut is on cooldown, applying Love Tap will reduce its remaining cooldown time by 2 seconds
- This scales linearly with cooldown reduction, 10% dropping it to 1.8 and so on.
Olaf–buffed
- Vicious Strikes (W):
- Life steal increased to 14/16/18/20/22% from 9/12/15/18/21%
- Ragnarok (R):
- Armour and magic resistance gain increased to 20/30/40 from 10/20/30
Rumble– buffed
- The Equalizer (R):
- Cooldown lowered to 110/100/90 from 120/110/100
- Flamespitter (Q):
- Now does full damage to minions, up from half
Items
Corrupting Potion– changed
- Now nicer on mana, less nice on survivability:
- Health restore per charge reduced to 125 from 150
- Mana restore per charge increased to 75 from 50
Iceborn Gauntlet – nerfed
- Unique Passive – Spellblade
- Now deals 100% of base AD, rather than 125%
Mercurial Scimitar – nerfed
- AD lowered to 65 from 75
- Total cost lowered to 3600 from 3700
Masteries
Grasp of the Undying– nerfed
- Life stolen lowered to 2.5% of your max health from 3%
Secret Stash– changed
- Biscuits now instantly restore 15/15 health/mana instead of 20/10.
Feast– nerfed
- Cooldown increased to 30 from 25
Taric Champion Spotlight:
Here’s Taric’s champion spotlight from Riot:
Patch 6.9 Mage Item Changes
6.9? Yes. A series of changes are being previewed, discussed and tested that are aiming for the next, mid-season patch focused around huge changes to items that provide ability power, mana or mana regeneration and magic resistance. Rather than run through each of these changes individually, considering they aren’t even in this patch cycle, here’s the forum post on the topic from technical designer Kuo-Yen “Xypherous” Lo. Warning: it is 2,696 words long and Lo has also made 107 further replies to the thread in response to feedback. Once 6.8 is fed to the wolves and 6.9 is on the way, we’ll bring you a more definitive run-down. As of right now they aren’t live on the PBE.
6.8 is now nearly over and will likely be released next week. That means 6.9, along with the major updates to Mages and the rest of the massive mid-season patch, will start its testing phase then. It’s now been confirmed by Meddler that the changes will hit PBE sometime next week.
Along with the items and mage reworks, one of the more recent champions Riot put out will be getting a quick spring tune-up in 6.9. Illaoi, the tentacle-commanding Kraken Princess, has a raft of tentative balance tweaks lined up. The currently suggested alterations are set at:
- Tentacles no longer appear in FoW for enemies
- Vessel duration cut dramatically (been testing values in the 10-15s range, down from 60s)
- Vessel state spawns nearby tentacles much faster 3-5s instead of 10s)
- Tentacles can spawn closer to each other if spawning from vessels
- Killing tentacles no longer allows you to clear the Vessel debuff
- Tentacles are no longer prevented from spawning if the vessel is recalling
It should be noted that despite the massive duration cut these aren’t straight nerfs as the Vessel debuff would now spawn more tentacles over a shorter time. Also the recall buff makes it basically impossible to escape, but with most of the dicussed changes, these will be worked on throughout the testing phase.
LoL Patch 6.8 New Skins
Second most important: cosmetics. Lovely, gorgeous cosmetics. Bit more of a visual medium this, so we’ve grabbed the best videos of each skin, as well as a lovely pic or two. Some are relatively simple changes, while others are total reworks of every part of the champion outside the gameplay numbers – new VO, new animations, new particles and the rest. It’s generally defined by how much they cost, so we’ve detailed that as well.
Infernal Diana
1350 RP Imperial.Details from Riot.
Here’s her splash:
SKT Squad
A series of skins for the champions SK Telecom T1 used to win last year’s world championships. Details from Riot.
SKT T1 Alistar
SKT T1 Elise
SKT T1 Renekton
SKT T1 Ryze
SKT T1 Sivir
Patch 6.8 Taric Login Screen
There’s a new login screen every patch, each with a short animation and a unique song. They’re always very good. 6.8’s is dedicated to the Taric reworkand the man himself’s bare chest:
Patch 6.8 Splash Art Update
In this patch cycle and in 6.7, Riot are updating a huge amount of champion and skin splash art – the large pieces that appear in the background of character overviews, and are used as posters for those champions and their powers. For a long time, there has been two sets of these for a huge selection of skins – one for the west, and one in use in China. Riot are unifying the two.
There’s a big thread on the forums explaining this, but the upshot is that every time they wanted to use splash art somewhere new, they had to do it twice for however many champions there were. If that involved editing the image in some way, either use a portion of it or doing actual jiggery-pokery, then it doubled the workload. Might not seem that big a deal, but imagine it across 100 skins, when you’re working on a tight deadline – not acceptable.
Riot Ququroon also made a new thread with loads more details about the update, what they normally do to splashes and a couple of extra screenshots of new art that’s on the way. He makes it clear that some of the leftovers are not going to be permanent as they’re not of the quality that’s expected. He also points out that there are other reasons for splash changes happening in this update, often involving making sure the game stays reasonably rated in certain regions, so that people can actually play it. That means no overly violent or sexual imagery, and the removal of certain frowned-upon items – alcohol, drugs, smoking, and so on. When you’re targeting hundreds of millions of players, actual laws come into play regarding underage gamers.
So, Riot are merging the two sets. Some Chinese art is coming to the west, some western art is heading to China. A lot of it is still quite poor in comparison to modern works, or at the very least out of style with the current ‘look’ of League of Legends – but it’s something Riot needs done to remove this blockage in their content creation pipeline. You can see all the changes in this patch via a handyImgur album, new versions first, old versions second. The last set are linked in our patch 6.7 post.
There’s also a selection of brand new splash arts for various champions and skins – these aren’t to do with the art merge, they’re just new assets that are ready for release and will land with the patch:
New Fiddlesticks Splash Art
New Kennan Splash Art
New Warwick Splash Art
New Blade Mistress Morgana Splash Art
New Darius Splash Art
New Swain Splash Art
New Galactic Renekton Splash Art
New Viscero Xin Zhao Splash Art
New Evelynn Splash Art
New Rammus Splash Art
New Tundra Hunter Warwick Splash Art
Patch 6.8 Shop Update
The in-game store is getting a facelift this patch as well. It’s part of the general upgrade for the client that’s been slowly underway this year, starting with the new ban and pick process. It’s a more modernised look, with better access to more information and nicer, higher-def borders and art on everything. Here’s a pic:
It’s now live on the main Taiwanese server, but continues testing on the 6.8 PBE for most. Some more info over onthe forums.
Patch 6.8 Release Date And Downtime
No word on a go-day for 6.8 yet, but patches are generally on a fortnightly basis. Expect it sometime in mid-April. We’ll keep you appraised, and remember that the server status page is always your best bet for knowing what’s happening when.
That’s League of Legends patch 6.7. We’ll update as and when we get more info, or we’ll see you for patch 6.8 in the very near future. Let us know below if there’s any vital info we missed!