It’s always a little disappointing when you read that a patch isn’t going to be named after the next new champion, because you just know that that means that further testing is required, and we’re not going to have something shiny and new to play with come patch day. So it is with Diana, the next League of Legends Champion. She’s been relegated to the test server until Riot can finish tuning her.
But fear not! There’s still plenty of changes coming in the next patch, and some of them are relatively big, at least for the champions affected. There’s also something new coming to the Tribunal, which should be good for those punished by their peers for being not-so-nice in matches.
The biggest changes are coming to Cho’gath, who’s getting the delay on his Rupture normalised into 0.5 seconds, instead of randomly going between two values. This makes it much more predictable, which means you can place it at just the right spot to knock up the entire enemy team, and laugh while you do. Vorpal Spikes is also getting a buff, increasing with size as you do, which apparently is more for effect than to make him any stronger, but byproducts that buff rather than nerf are always good.
Rumble has apparently become super powerful following a recent buff to Flamespitter, what with its damage going through the roof now that it’s a much more reliable ability, so he’s getting that reduced a little, along with Danger Zone’s damage bonus dropping 5% to 25%. Nerfs always feel a little depressing, so lets go back to a buff.
Urgot’s Acid Hunter was nerfed in Jayce’s patch, which made him a little bit useless, so that damage is going back up to what it was before. It’s actually relatively refreshing to see Riot happy to go back on decisions once they’re properly stress tested by the masses, and while they won’t necessarily apologise, it does mean that they’re paying attention rather than just throwing things out there that they think might work, and letting it stand.
Finally, Tribunal is now going to be emailing out ‘Reform Cards’ which give the punished player a detailed breakdown of exactly why they were punished, and hopefully a few suggestions on how not to be a dick, next time. We’ll see if it makes the community any less acerbic.
There are a bunch of other minor changes that you can see over on the detailed patch notes on the League of Legends site, and there’s also a video explaining some of the major changes.