League of Legends lead gameplay designer Mark Yetter posted some details about the upcoming LoL 10.14 patch on Twitter last night. This new update will roll out on July 7. A few big changes in the pipeline look to include nerfs for marksman Ezreal and Varus. Both of these champs are highly popular in the current meta, in both professional and solo queue play.
Champions that will be buffed include mid lane control mage Karthus and a trio of assassins – support Pyke, mid lane Zed, and jungler Kha’Zix.
10.14 Patch Preview here. Some changelists are in but I'll have the full list from the team tomorrow.
Worth noting – ghost and predator are here as followups from our last round of changes which ended up slightly nerfing them. pic.twitter.com/qippIuVBCO
— Mark Yetter (@MarkYetter) June 29, 2020
Bot Lane Nerfs
For one of the only two changes specified so far, mid lane Karthus will receive a decent buff. The control mage has been picked almost exclusively in the jungle in recent metas, despite previously being a mid lane champion for many seasons. League of Legends patch 10.14 will see Karthus’ spammable low-cooldown Q ability given a decent 5% extra AP scaling. On a champion that nearly always builds high AP damage for late-game burst, that can make a big difference in damage output.
Support assassin Pyke will get the other change that we have details on. His Q ability, a wind-up hook, will see a host of buffs to its cooldown, damage, and mana costs. That said, the champion’s MR and armor per level scaling will receive a small nerf.
The changes that will get the most attention, though, are probably the nerfs to Varus and Ezreal. Varus has been picked or banned in over 95% of competitive games across the LEC, LCS, and LCK this split. Expect the nerfs to the sharpshooting bowman to be fairly significant.
Ezreal has also been a consistent pick at all levels of League play for a while now. In solo queue, the mobile marksman has sat at a 50%-plus win rate and a high pick rate for weeks. So it’s easy to see why Riot plans to target him with a nerf.
Patch 10.14: What else?
We already know that this patch will add no less than eight new skins to the store. The two lines will be the Arcanist and Infernal lines. Karthus and Kennen are two of the champs to get an Infernal skin, while Kog’Maw and Zoe will get new looks with the Arcanist theme. Zoe will also receive a Prestige Edition Arcanist skin, for those of you who want to look real flash on the Rift.
The July 7 League of Legends patch 10.14 will also include the data for the returning Nexus Blitz game mode. Whether or not it will be playable on that date is unclear. However, Riot has confirmed it will ship out with this patch.
