Riot Games has released the patch notes for League of Legends update 14.19 and the big talking point from the patch notes is a massive round of nerfs to almost every legendary item currently in the game.
The 14.19 patch notes bring some significant changes to League of Legends, but without a doubt the biggest is the massive nerfs coming to some of the best items in the game, with the dev team saying the nerfs are anywhere from 5-12% for each item. The idea behind this set of nerfs if to slow down snowballing, the pacing of late game combat and overall make things a little easier to understand.
You’ll need to check out the full patch notes to see all the items that are being nerfed, because there is a lot, but the most common changes are that movement speed, ability haste, and damage output are being nerfed across the board, especially for classes that really don’t need any more of those attributes.
It remains to be seen what this change will have on League of Legends, but it should hopefully give you more of a chance if you fall behind early, which seems to be something the dev team is looking at given a target for next year is to reduce the feeling of hopelessness when the Nexus is exposed.
Elsewhere in the 14.19 patch notes there’s the usual round of champion tweaks, with the likes of Elise, K’Sante and Tristana getting some much-needed changes. The first of those three gets a big quality of life update that modernises the champion and should make her a lot more user-friendly, with changes such as her spiders always regening when summoned and a cooldown reduction on her ult that should make moving around a lot easier.
Compared to some recent patches, this feels like a major update for League of Legends, but as this will be the first patch that doesn’t impact the pro scene that isn’t all that surprising. With the Worlds patch being locked in a few weeks ago there’s less of an issue if something completely breaks the game now, as the biggest event of the year won’t be impacted. So you can probably expect a few more experimental patches like this before the end of the year and the start of the next season. And of course, we still have Teemo’s theme song to look forward to in a few weeks.
