Penultimate patch of 2024: Bounties adjusted, Smolder, Rell, Ambessa and Jinx adjusted while Rengar receives a huge buff
The League of Legends 14.23 Patch Notes is out. According to the official schedule the game's developers provided, Patch 14.23 is set to be released on Wednesday, November 20, 2024. This is the penultimate patch before the end of the year. Riot aims to balance some very popular champions in solo queue and in pro plays, like Rell, Aurora, and Smolder, and is pushing for some forgotten champions to make a comeback like Azir or Rengar's buffs. On the other hand, they made several adjustments and bug fixing to Ambessa who just hit the Rift in the previous patch, and reviewed their bounty processes. They also bring a pretty huge buff to Yun Tal Wildarrows after its entire rework in the previous patch.
Here’s a comprehensive look at what to expect.
Buffs:
Azir, Master Yi, Miss Fortune, Rammus, Rengar, Yun Tal Wildarrows (Item)
Nerfs:
Caitlyn, Kha'Zix, Kog'Maw, Shyvana, Skarner, Tahm Kench (AP), Teemo, Zac, Youmuu's (Item), Collector (Item)
Adjustments:
Ambessa, Aurora, Jinx, Rell, Smolder and Bounties
Riot's Reasoning behind these changes
Read more about League of Legends changes on the X account of Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison.
"Rell
- Rell has been a mainstay for a while in Pro.
- Her midscope gave her a lot of fun tools, but also the capability of that on her CC chaining potential is too strong
- We're adding a bunch of power into other portions of her kit to compensate
Smolder
- Smolder is a really popular champion, but he gets held down a bit by being a great champ in Pro
- He's quite good at stalling out games, especially in the mid-late game with some of his waveclear capabilities; and those skew more towards Pro
- We're bringing a bunch of these capabilities down as well as his stack scaling (which we still want to reward, but we know Pros are significantly better at this than regular players)
Jinx
- Jinx's poke caster builds have been strong for a while (eg. collector) and while it's cool that she has builds like that, she is at her core an auto attacker (and seemingly what players want to do well as they purchase YunTal more frequently than Collector even though it's weaker)
- So we're shifting a bit of the incentives here to make a bit more sense
Zac
- Zac has been showing up in a bunch of different lanes other than jungle and while he's mostly performant in jungle, we're taking a small tap to his ranged harass abliity in top lane (especially)
Tahm Kench
- Captain Gameplay is a lover of alt builds and AP Kench was the soup du jour a while ago...
- He's picked up a bit to be a little stronger than intended and while we like AP builds sometimes, it's just generically stronger than the pure tank build and we want them to be closer together
Kog'Maw
- Kog has been picking up a lot of play with his.... AP builds?!
- We're pulling back a little on these builds to make sure that the AP and AD builds feel similarly powerful"
Header Photo Credit: Riot Games
- Clément Chocat -
