The mid season is upon us and Riot just released its Patch Notes for the massive 6.9 patch. There are the elemental dragons, mage reworks and item changes that we went over when they were released on the PBE.
iDigitalTimes asked Annie Bot , the world’s foremost Annie main, about the Annie and item changes. He said Annie will remain relatively unchanged: her W and Ultimate reliability will go down, but be offset by the buff to her E and to Tibbers. She loses some AOE damage, but the new items buff her tremendously. Hextech Protobelt-01 gives Annie a 40-second dash that Annie Bot says “is too good and won’t last.”
Illaio, Kindred, Taric and Soraka all got nerfs to knock them down a few notches on the tier ladder.
Riot has struggled with keeping the game paced properly. Either the game goes by too fast and we get one-sided team fights that win games in 20 minutes, or we get slow games where tanks keep everyone alive long past 50 minutes. This patch is meant to bring League of Legends somewhere in the middle.
Rift Herald now only spawns once, is harder to kill and when you kill him you get an entirely new buff. It’s called “Glimpse of the Void” and lasts for 20 (!!!) minutes. It mitigates all damage you take by five percent, and builds up charges and bursts like Runic Echoes. Baron Nashor buff now lasts for thirty more seconds.
Blue and Red Buff give and do more damage, Riot wants these buffs to be more contestable. All jungle camp respawn timers can be seen by both enemies. Only the player that kills a jungle camp gains the camps’ experience, and players with jungling items gain more experience when they kill them.
Since the preseason when Riot lowered the damage and strength of towers, these map structures have felt relatively weak. Tower dives have become even more common this season and Riot wants to change that. Towers now have more resistances and deal more damage. Now when you get dived level three, you might actually make it out alive. Killing turrets also grants more gold, which will hopefully mean the end of the boring LCS style tower trade.
Homeguard now gives one second less movement speed, but scales with game time. Boot enchantments are gone: goodbye Alacrity. The jungle enchantment Devourer has been replaced by Bloodrazor that deals three percent of the target’s maximum health as bonus damage. Quicksilver Sash now only remove crowd control debuffs, and Doublelift does not like change one bit .
My favorite change of all is Grievous Wounds now affect all forms of outside healing, which is the nerf Soraka has needed for about a year. Riot finally listened!
