Riot Games has released the patch notes for League of Legends update 14.18, which will be the patch that the upcoming world championship is played on. With the focus on Worlds, the big talking point is a major nerf to lane swaps as well as some big champion changes ahead of the event.
While many of the recent patches have had changes designed for Worlds, this is the big patch and the one that will actually be played throughout the event. The usual patch schedule will continue as the event kicks off, but the tournament will all be played on 14.18, even if there are newer patches available on live servers.
As this is one of the most pro focuses patches of the year, the big focus has been on making pro matches more interesting, and top of the list in that department is dealing with lane swaps. While lane swaps can be exciting, in the current meta they tend to make games fairly boring and as a result some changes have been made that should punish the team that swaps lanes.
Now, for the first five minutes of the game the mid and top turrets will take 40% less damage, while the bottom tower will have lower resistances making it, theoretically at least, easier to take. This means that if a team decides to send their bot laner to a different lane in the hopes of pushing another turret early they will have a much harder time, while the players who stay in place should have an easier match-up as they can take the turret fairly quickly.
The full patch notes feature a few other tweaks to common champs and items that could also dissuade teams from trying lane swaps at Worlds, which likely means we are in for a fairly standard tournament when it comes to how the League of Legends early game is played.
When it comes to champion changes in the 14.18 patch notes, there are a lot of changes to the top LoL champs right now, with ADC mids getting targeted pretty hard. However, there’s also quite a few buffs, with a lot of top laners getting some love to bring them up to similar power levels of the top champs in that role. Of course, as is almost always the case, there will likely be a few champs that have been over tuned and turn out to be must picks or bans throughout Worlds.
