Hecarim Patch Notes Commentary

Okay with the Hecarim patch finally out I feel like doing a commentary on some of the changes in there. I wont do anything on Hecarim himself until I've had a good chance to pick him up and play.

Okay let's start with Champion Changes:


Ignoring what is a small tweak to Annie the changes start with Akali base armour and health both increased by a small amount to make her slightly tankier early game and some bug fixes on both her shroud and ult. Her shroud notably now should always give assists when you hide in it and slow people so Akali players should be getting more assists round the board and should be pretty happy with these small tweaks to make her slightly better.

From then it's pretty much all bug fixes until Kayle where her generally lackluster heal is getting some changes with the amount healed and movement speed increase both buffed fairly substantially at low levels, the movement speed duration increased to 3 seconds and the mana cost increased slightly with the greatest difference seen at low levels. These changes should help both solo top Kayle's sustain and support Kayle's healing potential and general utility. Here I was thinking riot hated all heals and sustain...

Janna is getting a couple of tweaks, her tornado is being changed so you actually have to charge it to gain the same knockup that you got instantly pre-patch. This will make Janna players plan ahead more as it will be slightly less useful for chasing and instant CC. Her ult's mana cost is being reduced by 50 across the board which is a good buff however the radius is being reduced to 875. Overall a bit of a rocky patch for Janna with some buffs and some nerfs.

From Janna it's all bug fixes until Orianna where her command: attack's mana cost being changed to a flat 50 at all levels, this should further encourage maxing command attack first and will give her substantially stronger laning as a result of this spammable, powerful, low mana cost poke. After Orianna, Sejauni gets some cooldown reduction on her ult and a small mana cost reduction on her Arctic assault. This shouldn't affect Sejuani's playing too much but it is still a nice little buff to a rarely seen champion.

Swain's getting mana cost reduction on his ult and is getting a slight improvement to his godawful auto-attack animation, as a result he should be able to stay as a giant cr- CAWCAWCAWCAWCAWCAWCAW for longer and be a little better at last hitting.

One of the major things from the patch preview was the Teemo changes, though only a bugfix to toxic shot it means that suddenly on hit Teemo should be doing noticeably more damage along with that we have a small bugfix to his ultimate and Move Quick's cooldown has been reduced meaning the little yordle/rabbit/badger will slip out of your grasp more often. More small bug fixes for lots of champions until we get to Zilean who is getting a mana cost reduction on his Time Warp and Chronoshift which should make support Zilean a little more appealing to people.

Well that about sums it up for champions let's move onto...

Item Changes:


I've already discussed the changes to Atma's Impaler below so that's already been dealt with. Doran's Ring and Blade are both dropping down from +100health to +80 making stacking them slightly less viable for winning your lane as you're slightly less tanky but apart from that they still give decent all round stats for early game but aren't quite as great value as they were before. A small buff to Hexdrinker making the shield last longer, this combined with the release of Maw not too long ago should make Hexdrinker a more popular item. Finally on major item changes the cost of wit's end is going up by 150 gold, though a nontrivial increase in price I think wit's end is a good enough item for it to still be bought on many champions and the price rise wont affect it's popularity or usefulness too much.

'General' Changes:
A couple of HUD upgrades like showing your health and mana regen on the bars and displaying damage above your enemies when you hit them are quite nice and well received but the major change this patch is the changes to champion kills. You now gain substantially more xp for slaying an enemy of a higher level than you and get reduced xp for killing lower level ones. As mentioned in the patch preview this is especially good for supports as they can tend to drop behind and getting more xp for their assists will mean when teamfights are in full swing they'll be able to easily catch up. This also helps losing teams fight back and possibly pull a win out of a loss, as happened on my team just before writing this article. Combo'd with this is the fact that the maximum gold for stopping a killing spree has been boosted to 600 making taking down strong opponents even more rewarding. I'm fully in favor of this change as it helps counter snowballing teams and gives more late-gate oriented teams a better chance in competitive play.

I'll throw the rune changes into general changes, minor MR rune nerfs will probably effect tanky dps the most as they tend to run MR blues and will make them more vulnerable to mages early game. This being combo'd with buffs to both magic pen and AP runes meaning mages should be a little bit more dangerous to most people early game.

Well apart from adding in a couple of bots to Co-op vs AI that about sums up this patch. Quite a lot of changes in there and in my opinion pretty good ones at that. Now we wait for the Varus patch which hopefully shouldn't be delayed as long as this one.