It’s that time again, and though I have a load of thoughts about the Season One features I still want to cover the changes to the actual game. The Season One patch actually brought a lot of champion and game changes with it.

The most notable change, in my mind, is the Cleanse change. Prior to the nerf, Cleanse was the skill I saw most often at the loading screen. Now, though, it feels almost useless. As of the current patch, Cleanse only removes CC effects, silences, and blinds. That’s right, ignite cannot be cleansed. Neither can Morgana ult, Kaiser ult, Malzahar ult, or any of the DoTs in the game. This is a huge buff to the characters that rely on ignite for their killing power (Kat, Ezreal, Shaco) and a big fat nerf for most carries. I should also note that Cleanse does not work on Exhaust, even though it’s a slow/blind.

Among other general game changes, Revive now grants 225 percent run speed as a diminishing buff on use. Ignite also got a small damage nerf. The jungle has been normalized a bit so that one side can’t get an advantage over the other simply by lucky dual-golem camp spawns. Twisted Treeline experience is a bit different now that Grez no longer grants global XP/gold for the killing team. It will still be important, but won’t snowball nearly as badly. Turret damage is also up a bit, and there’s been a change to the way inhibitors respawn. Inhibitors always stay down for five minutes now, and if all inhibitors respawn, the nexus and nexus turrets become invulnerable. Just bring down one inhib to win the game.

There’s a new item in game that should make junglers happy:

New Item: Wriggle’s Lantern
+35 Damage, +30 Armor, +14% Lifesteal
UNIQUE Passive: 20% chance on attack to deal 500 damage to a minion.
UNIQUE Active: Places an invisible ward with 1100 range sight and lasts for 3 minutes. 3 minute cooldown.

It’s a cool item, especially because of the ward. It is a little on the expensive side when compared with the marginally greater cost of Madred’s and the much more valuable attributes on Madred’s. Still, the free ward is really nice.

On to the champion changes – I’ll be writing a separate post regarding Xin Zhao so check back for more info.

Heimer got nerfed versus turrets again – concussion grenade deals 50 percent less damage to turrets and has a slightly longer cooldown. It won’t fix all of the problems around Heimer but it will probably make people cry a little bit less.

Kassadin has received a bit of a rework. His W skill no longer drains mana and instead restores it on every hit (good for non-mana targets). It also now has an active that increases armor penetration by quite a lot. I don’t think it fixes his problems – he has to blink in to serious trouble to deal damage and then can’t really escape – but it should help if you want to try hybrid/AD builds. He also gains more attack speed from his passive than before.

Kayle caught another nerf – no splash damage on turrets and a Divine Blessing move speed nerf. I think this pretty much cements her as a useless bag of crap unless you can get a legendary farm over your opponents. With a shorter ult duration and less tower pushing, she’s pretty much back to her pre-buff level in my opinion.

Pantheon received even more surgery. His stun now scales in duration so you should be able to avoid a little Heartseeker damage early. His spearshot is now more expensive/less-spammable, and Aegis has had its CD normalized to 12 seconds. Overall he should be a little more fun to play in the early game (no more eternal cooldowns) and a bit easier to avoid in terms of damage output.

The rest of the changes are pretty small – a slight damage buff for Veigar, TF PaC can’t be dodged, hit box spells like Feast, Fling, and Consume are a bit easier to cast and a load of bug fixes. For the full list, read up on the official forums.

What do you know – the day I write a post about the general lack of LoL-related news we get a patch announcement and a preview Champion Spotlight. There is much to cover so I’ll be making several posts to try to wrap everything up.

Let’s start with the obvious: Olaf. The viking champion will be making his live debut some time tomorrow afternoon (for those of you on EST like me). He’s a tanky melee DPS champion, not entirely unlike…well, okay, he’s unlike most melee champions in the way his damage scales up with his health and the fact that his attack speed goes up as his health goes down. Overall, I think he will be a dangerous character to tangle with anywhere past level eight or so. For more on Olaf’s abilities check out my earlier post.

Aside from the new champion, the most notable change is a big fat nerf to support healing toons. Nidalee finally caught a heal nerf that should significantly reduce her ability to play like a crazy fool in the early game and heal through it all. Her heal is down nearly 30 percent at all ranks, though it did get an ability power bump from .8 to 1.25. That sounds big, but it will mean a weaker early game and about the same mid to late for her, which is just what she needed.

Ezreal caught a similar (and long overdue) nerf. The heal from his Essence Flux is now down to 50 percent of the damage dealt and has had the attack speed debuff reduced as well. Trueshot Barrage had its AP ratio down from 1.0 to 0.7, which should keep him more in line with other highly escapable champions.

The rest of the champion changes are fairly minor barring the Kayle remake, which I’ll cover in another post. TF caught a bit of a nerf and Shen’s shield was indeed reverted to work like a regular shield, which is sure to bring a lot of tears from Shen players (honestly, those guys are starting to sound like Jax players to me).

As for the rest of the game, there’s a new, ability power equivalent to the BF Sword called the Needlessly Large Rod. For 1600g you can get 80 AP. It’s a nice boost for those AP Kat players and frankly, it’s been a long time coming. Twisted Treeline got a few gold generation changes and some rework on the Lizard, but none of that stuff is really going to change the game too much.

I’ll be covering the rest of the patch throughout the next couple days. Keep an eye out for the new skins. They are oh-so-sweet.

It’s finally patch day, and for real this time. Unfortunately this patch has one very serious problem – it can completely trash your installation. There are now several posts on the forums filling rapidly with reports of trashed installations after attempting a patch. I’ve experienced the same problem and had to reinstall, a long and painful process with the number of players forced to do the same.

I don’t hesitate to say that I’m a little worried for Riot. The company is having huge scaling issues. Between the server crashes, the large number of bugs/exploits that come with each patch, and the string of nerfs and buffs that seem out of line due to a lack of testing, I can’t help wondering when they’ll catch up. The list of open positions is enormous and shows some gaping holes in current company structure. Here’s a short list of what Riot’s missing: Technical Director, Database Administrator, Director of Operations, System Administrator, Senior Game Designer. That’s a short list, obviously not including junior level positions. All of those gaps are presumably being filled along with other regular duties by the current staff.

As excited as I was for this patch, I can’t help feeling more than a little miffed by all the problems. Oh, did I mention the Jax buff? Yuck.

I was pretty excited about the upcoming content patch, so you can imagine my chagrin when my News stories remained the same after this morning’s short patch. The patch only took an hour and fifteen minutes and has yet to have any info associated with it. It was probably some kind of behind the scenes work to prep for the patch next week.

Yes, unfortunately I think we’re looking at next week as the official launch. It could be very early in the week, but I would plan for a Tuesday downtime. The post announcing skin bundles has been ninja-updated to include the phrases “available through the end of the first weekend post-patch” and “through the end of the patch weekend” instead of those March 14th dates originally listed.

I guess my initial instinct was right. I’m not surprised. Again, this patch is so content heavy that there is very little room for error and a lot of places mistakes can be made. I’m glad they pushed it back.