I’m ready to call today’s patch the biggest thing that has happened to the game since the release of Season One. Today, Riot finally took some steps the reds have been talking about on the forums for months, making changes that could have a significant impact on the metagame. It won’t change things entirely, but it will almost certainly start to shift things in a new direction.

This is one of the first patches for which we’ve seen Riot give overarching design notes along with the line by line changes. Let’s start with those.

This patch is focused upon the following main issues:

Area of Effect damage and disable spells being too powerful
Area of Effect is taking a pretty large hit this patch, especially to the damage on Galio’s Idol of Durand, Morgana’s Soul Shackles and Vladimir’s Hemoplague. After seeing its effect on the game over a longer period of time, we’ve found something more akin to Annie’s Summon: Tibbers is a proper mix of area size, damage, and disable. We have several area-effect skills in the game that have snuck past this and we’re looking to bring these back to acceptable levels.

Strong supports are able to protect powerful ranged carries too well, cancelling their fragility too easily
We’re starting with a duration nerf to Morgana’s Black Shield and Janna’s Eye of the Storm to reward better timing of the spell reactively and to raise the skill ceiling a bit on these spells. If this proves too little, we’ll evaluate the need for additional changes in a future patch.

Ranged carries, holistically, are too safe considering their damage output
While we predict bigger changes will be required, our first adjustments are to lower the movement speeds of ranged carry-style champions to provide more of a tradeoff, and nerf Blessing of the Lizard Elder when used on ranged champions. We’d like to keep ranged carries “safer” than melee, while beginning to provide more tradeoffs that both give melee a place in the game and differentiate the roles of melee and ranged characters.

I was thrilled when I read these. These are exactly the kind of changes I’ve been waiting on, and it seems the community has been waiting on, for some time. While there are still issues associated with individual champions, it’s nice to see that the roadmap leads away from the issues above.

On to the more specific champion changes. As usual, I’ll be covering the big stuff and leaving it to you to work through the minor adjustments.

Alongside the ranged nerfs, Corki no longer reveals stealthed units (including wards) with Phosphorous Bomb. His gatling gun can also no longer damage unseen wards. I hesitate to call this a nerf because really, these things were far too powerful for just one character to have. It’s a good fix, although the PBomb change is a slight nerf against stealth characters, which kinda sucks.

Galio got some big changes, as mentioned in the design notes. Righteous Gust got a significant AP ratio nerf, though a buff to the speed increase, and Resolute Smite got a small AP ratio buff. I like both changes – they focus his damage output toward the skillshot that’s more difficult to land and make Gust more of a utility spell. His ultimate got an AP ratio nerf, a nerf to the bonus damage attackers generate for Galio, and a nerf to the max damage attackers can generate for the ultimate. It’s a serious nerf across the board and one I’m glad to see.

Janna’s ultimate got nerfed along with the change to Eye of the Storm. She’s always been a very strong support, but the heal-per-second nerf to her ultimate is pretty huge. I’ll be interested to see how it pans out. Morgana, who seems to be everyone’s favorite support, also got an ultimate nerf – damage, cooldown, and stun duration all took a hit.

Pantheon finally got the rework people have been waiting for. His damage has been shifted toward Heartseeker Strike with a percentage buff to the damage and a nerf to the base damage on Spear Shot. I wouldn’t be surprised if people still build him the same, maxing Spear Shot and then Aegis for the cooldown reduction, but work Heartseeker into the skill rotation for more damage.

Sona got another string of incremental nerfs to every skill but her ultimate. The nerfs all went to base power, so she’ll still scale well, just won’t be quite as strong in the early game.

That’s it for hero changes, other than the large scale adjustments mentioned in the design notes. There was also an interesting change to Doran’s Blade and Doran’s ring, both of which got health and utility contributions nerfed, likely to discourage stacking. The damage contribution got buffed, though, which could help stacking remain economical.

That’s it for the patch. You can bet I’ll have some specific impressions later in the day/week. Check back soon for my Trundle impressions.

I woke up this morning excited to get a look at the Trundle spotlight and then wait eagerly for servers to come back online. No such luck. It looks like today isn’t going to be patch day after all, and though I haven’t been able to confirm it personally, I’ve heard we won’t see the update until Thursday. UPDATE: Tamat confirmed the patch is coming tomorrow (Wednesday).

I’m pretty bummed out, if only because I think Trundle could be a bit of a return to sanity in the design department. Irelia was underwhelming, both in her skillset and her playstyle. She just doesn’t have the fun factor that makes some of the other reasonably powered champions a blast to play and she isn’t really strong enough to be fun to dominate games with. Trundle, on the other hand, sounds like he’ll be a lot of fun, even if he doesn’t crush, and I’ve been itching for something new to play outside the tanky dps metagame.

At any rate, we’ll be waiting a couple days to see the nifty new character as well as the next round of patch notes. Exercise that patience, folks.

Trundle drops tomorrow, bringing the field up to a total of 65 champions. The announcement post confirmed the skill list that was leaked around his initial debut, a skillset that I think is among the more interesting in the game.

Trundle is, as far as I can tell, a debuffer. His skills seem to be aimed at breaking the tank/physical DPS metagame by stealing stats from those archetypes and providing support with an AoE slow. In all honesty, my first thought was, “Wow, this is what Mordekaiser should have been.”

Abilities:

Rabid Bite: Trundle bites his opponent, dealing damage and sapping some of their attack damage.

Contaminate: Trundle infects a target location with his curse, gaining attack speed, movement speed, and crowd control reduction while on it.

Pillar of Filth: Trundle creates a plagued beacon at a target location, which becomes impassable terrain and slows all nearby enemy units.

Agony (Ultimate): Trundle immediately steals his target’s health and a percentage of their armor and magic resistance. Over the next six seconds the amount of health, armor, and magic resistance stolen is doubled.

Decompose (Passive): Whenever an enemy unit near Trundle dies, he heals for a percentage of their maximum health.

Trundle is melee, and from the sound of things he’ll do very well with some sort of tanky attack speed build. That does make me a little wary, as it was my chief complaint with Irelia, but his passive is worlds better than hers and he has some additional utility that appears to be castable from range.

I’ll be most interested to see how his ultimate works out. The design seems much more interesting than Mordekaiser’s, to the point that I wish Kaiser had been released with this skillset instead of his own. It has a nice, short duration during which it will still provide a massive benefit to Trundle and a solid debuff on the target. It’s solid against tanks and carries alike, and it doesn’t have the ridiculous all-or-nothing pet system that Children of the Grave uses.

I don’t want to say much more, because his skills could go a lot of different directions. I could see his Pillar of Filth being either very useful or very situational. The same goes for Contiminate. In any case, you definitely will not want to fight him one on one. Check back tomorrow for my full impressions.