League of Legends patch 6.4 is full of your usual tweaks to individual characters, but the most interesting change here is a holistic reduction to movement speed.
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“Zooming around the rift is cool and all, but the abundance of bonus movement speed is skewing the early game into a sonic-speed arms-race of who can stack it more, faster,” says Patrick “Scarizard” Scarborough in the patch notes. “We’ll continue to monitor the game’s mobility creep over the next few patches, but this is our first push toward solving what could become a larger problem.”
As for the character tweaks, Ahri’s Charm no longer interrupts dash, Ashe’s Q stacks now fall off one at a time and Q duration is increased,Kog’Maw has seen its attack speed lowered and loads more. You might notice that some heroes are being buffed after previously being nerfed and vice versa when you read the patch notes, and Riot Games have provided us all with a nice, logical explanation for the yoyo-ing.
“If our goal was only to make champions stronger or weaker, reverts (or partial reverts, like Zed’s changes in 6.3) are a reasonable approach. However, when we take on balance work for a champion, the changes that make it to the patch notes often have more than one goal in mind.
“For example, if our goal was ‘make X champion stronger and healthier’ but the character became stronger and more frustrating, we’d prefer to solve the newly-created frustration than simply reverting everything. For us, game balance is an ongoing journey – meaning that at any given moment, you may be seeing a snapshot of an ongoing, iterative investigation.”
So that’s that, then.