It’s been a bit of a rough start to 2025 for casual League of Legends fans such as myself. The new season launch felt a little underwhelming, largely down to the new format of having three a year, and the reworked champ unlock and rewards system didn’t help matters at all. However, the new set of League of Legends patch notes are out, and they make for some great reading, specifically for me.
In a change that I imagine most people will not care about as much as I do, the patch naming convention is being reverted back to the old system. Since the launch of the new season, the patches have been named with the format of: year, season, patch, meaning the first patch of the year was 25.S1.1. This not only massively deviated from the old system of having the season and then patch number, it was also really confusing for anyone used to dealing with the old system for over 10 years.
Having seen the feedback, Riot now agrees that this new system sucks and is essentially reverting back to the old system. Now the LoL patch notes will simply be named with the year and the patch number, making this patch 25.04, which is much simpler to understand. Good job Riot!
Some other areas of the 25.04 patch notes also make for good reading if you play the same champions as me. Both Ashe and Gangplank, two champs I play a fair amount of, are getting buffs, which again makes me very pleased with this patch. The former gets damage boosts to her Q, W and R, while the latter gets an AD growth increase that should be fairly substantial.
If you don’t play either of those champions, or care about the patch note naming conventions, then this patch might not be quite as exciting for you. If you happen to play Hwei, Kalista, Kog’Maw, Lulu or Warwick then it will likely be a bad patch, as they all get nerfs ranging from minor to fairly big.
Those that do fall into the camp of hating most things in this patch might find solace in the fact that the Honor system rework will launch this week as well, shortly after patch 25.04 arrives. Now Honor is based on your recent communications, rather than just building up over a season, which means you can’t just be nice for a week then turn into a horrible teammate because you have Honor to spare.
Honor level three is now the baseline for players who aren’t disruptive or positive, and is what is required to get access to most communication options. Higher Honor levels will grant you battle pass XP drops, while hitting level five will give you access to ally-targeted pings. Lower Honor levels will see your access to rewards and some chat features restricted. Basically, be pleasant and get rewarded.
The full League of Legends 25.04 patch notes include info on item balance changes, ARAM tweaks and changes to Atakhan’s spawn logic that is too complicated for me to explain easily, so you’ll have to read how Riot did it and then probably not notice the change anyway!
