We're back again with another patch, this time with some Brawl balance flavor!
We’ve got a gameplay update to Garen in this patch that’s aimed at making his fighter builds functional and performant, pushing him away from high burst crit builds. We’ve also got the normal array of balance updates, addressing a few pieces we overshot last patch and generally bringing up the bottom end of the roster.
Swiftplay Champion Select is getting some nice QoL changes when it comes to picking what you want to play and seeing what runes your teammates are using! On the Behavioral front we have some adjustments coming under the hood that should result in habitual leavers getting a bit harsher punishments, as well as the detection system to be a little bit tighter on higher skill players who know better.
Switching gears to the Brawl side of things we have a laundry list of balance changes to address what feels like almost every champ in the roster. Some buffs, some adjustments, and some fixes to an interesting strat of killing minions from base because that happened. Check 'em out below!
If you're looking for the TFT patch notes you can find them here!
Patch Highlights
The updated Masque of the Black Rose Vladimir, Masque of the Black Rose Samira, Masque of the Black Rose Renata Glasc, and Masque of the Black Rose Elise will be available May 29th, 2025.
25.11 Live Date Adjustment
Due to it being a holiday on Monday the 26th in the US, the 25.11 Live date has been pushed back a day to account for our usual rollout schedule!
25.11 Will go live on May 29th at the usual times in your respective regions.
Swiftplay Champ Select Improvement
Previously, when hovering on teammates' icons in swiftplay lobby, players could not view their keystone rune selected (but could view their champ selected, skin, spells, etc). So in 25.11 we are adding this functionality so players are able to view teammates' keystone runes.
We're also adding 2 champion sorting filters to the Swiftplay champ select hud so you can easily find your favorite champions a little bit easier/faster.
Players are able to sort champions by "mastery" and "favourite".
Players are now able to view premade teammates' keystone runes.
Behavioral Systems
LeaverBuster
We're adjusting LeaverBuster's calculations under the hood in order to set a higher bar for what's an acceptable level of AFKing, disconnecting, or leaving matchmade games. The tuning will still allow players who have occasional computer or internet issues to get back into good standing but habitual rage-quitters and consistent disconnectors will receive harsher penalties sooner.
In-Game Negative Behavior
We're modifying some new rules to our “In Game Negative Behavior” detection system (also known as “Soft Inting”) in order to catch more players who should know better.
Reduced the thresholds specifically for higher ranked players to be detected for negative behavior.
Pride 2025
It's our fifth year celebrating Pride month, and the eight year now of sharing the in-game icons, homeguard trails, emotes, and more. For 2025 we have a new free emote, and we're bringing back some of your favorite Pride items from the past. Don't miss out on enjoying this before the event ends with patch 25.13. We have a new Rainbow Warpaint emote that you can claim immediately on the patch going live. No mission or Blue Essence needed. Simply claim it with a single click during the event. We also have a mission that will reward you with some Battle Pass experience for playing 3 games with friends.
To learn more about the event and how we're celebrating for both League of Legends and TFT check out the article we released on it.
Kill & Takedown SFX
As mentioned in the Season 2 dev update, Kill & Takedown SFX are here! These sweet sound effects spice up League's most satisfying moments. These will play for your ears only. On multi-kills, the sounds will escalate to serve as your own personal hype squad as you chase that Pentakill.
Added Kill & Takedown SFX.
Misc. adjustments to sound option sliders. The volume of the new SFX can be adjusted with the “Notifications & UI” slider.
Passive damage decreased. Q Sweet Spot damage increased. W damage type changed to physical.
We'd like Aatrox to feel better about some conventional fighter items like Black Cleaver, and now that we have more levers to tune fighter-vs-lethality builds, we're returning W's damage to physical, which should allow him access to more fighter items like Black Cleaver. He's also the current top dog of top lane, so we're adjusting some of his strengths to make landing Q sweet spots more important for both his damage output and healing.
Passive - Deathbringer Stance
Damage: 4-12% max HP (based on level) ⇒ 4-8% max HP (based on level)
Base Armor increased, Armor Growth decreased. W damage decreased.
Annie's adjustments have landed well, making her a functional burst mage who relies on her spell hits to deal damage. However, there's still some minor tuning to iron out, largely around her laning phase being a bit too weak and her late game being a bit too strong. These changes are meant to be only lightly power negative overall while giving her a much better early laning phase.
Ashe's Q unlike many other marksman's attack passives (see Caitlyn Passive) cannot stack on structures but its damage can affect structures which creates peculiar optimizations - letting her stack this Q on structures should help avoid these unintuitive optimizations and let her feel better about sieging towers in general.
After changes to AP itemization, Diana is doing well in mid but struggling in the jungle. We're giving her some extra clear speed to help her keep up now that she isn't leaning on early Fated Ashes.
Elise has been a beneficiary of the mage items changes, and has been very prominent especially in elite brackets. This change is targeted at softening her clear speed especially when snowballing, and lowering her over time PvP damage.
We're updating Garen to make his fighter pattern much more functional. The headlining features are a reduced cooldown on Judgment in order to allow him to play out sustained combat and an improved Courage active in order to better soak up damage. As compensation, he's losing a bit of burst damage through critical strike chance on E and overall damage on R. Our hope with these changes is to make fighter builds for Garen his best option and raise their power, as fighter Garen is currently underpowered.
Base Armor increased. E damage increased. R damage decreased.
We are unhappy with the degree of Kassadin's current power curve, as he has been feeling a bit too weak in early game for most players while gaining a massive amount of power if allowed to by the 30 minute mark. Looking to relax his curve some, while still ensuring that players feel like level 16 is a high moment.
Lucian has been dominating the bot lane for a while now. While he's meant to shine in the early game, he's a little too good at getting himself early advantages.
Rengar is like a dog chasing cars , except he's a cat chasing ADCs. Problem is, he can't chase as often as he'd like. Despite a low pickrate, he's historically been one of the best Axiom Arc users in the game, indicating his clear desire for hunting more. Giving Rengar a jungle skewed ult CD buff to strengthen his ability to snowball from the jungle.
W damage decreased. R Passive Overload damage increased.
Ryze has lost a lot from recent itemization changes, and could use a boost. Giving him some power centered around his level 6 spike to enable him to get out there and make some plays.
Q lifesteal effectiveness increased. W damage decreased. R lifesteal effectiveness increased.
Samira is statistically fine, but she's very sharply dependent upon getting kills in lane and struggles to teamfight without a large lead. We're bumping up her lifesteal synergy in order to enable builds that aren't all about maximum damage and taking a bit away from her burst combo to compensate.
Despite being a thematically scale-ing dragon, Smolder's early game is actually quite potent. Peeling back some of his comfort early game by allowing enemy poke to hurt more and stick better.
Twisted Fate has been on the weaker side ever since the RoA changes, and these changes are targeted to help his early game and his wave clear break points.
AP Twitch has been terribad for a while now. While we really don't want AP Support Twitch, we think there's safe room for a revert of a prior nerf while we are also adjusting AP items, and then possibly a re-assessment sometime down the line.
Currently, AD Udyr with Q max is having a resurgence while R-centric Udyr builds have fallen significantly behind. We're looking to bring Phoenix Udyr back up to enable him to compete, and particularly looking to reward Udyr for getting his R stance attacks off.
Horizon Focus's changes succeeded in wooing some new mage users but is overall a little too weak in the average case. We're delivering some direct buffs in order to make sure Horizon is appealing.
Total Gold Cost: 2900 ⇒ 2800
Ability Power: 110 ⇒ 115
ARAM
Hello ARAMers, in this patch, we're taking another look at ADCs to restore some of their late-game damage potential. For mages—particularly Seraphine—we're shifting power toward her damage spells rather than her supportive tools. Sett as well continues to perform strongly, so we're further reducing power from his W, giving opponents more room to react in fights.
As always, we'd love to hear how you're feeling about the recent direction of removing extra nerfs from champions. We'll keep listening and tuning as we go. GLHF.
Champions
Caitlyn
Damage Taken: 105% ⇒ 100%
Janna
Shielding: 95% ⇒ 100%
Jhin
Damage Dealt: 93% ⇒ 95%
Lux
Shielding: 80% ⇒ 90%
Miss Fortune
Damage Dealt: 93% ⇒ 95%
Nilah
Damage Dealt: 97% ⇒ 100%
Seraphine
Damage Dealt: 95% ⇒ 100%
Sett
W Stored Health: 40% ⇒ 35%
Singed
Damage Dealt: 90% ⇒ 95%
Varus
Damage Taken: 105% ⇒ 100%
ARAM Bugfixes
Fixed a bug where Garen's W tooltip was displaying incorrect numbers.
Fixed a bug where Shaco's R clone was spawned with an extra VFX.
Fixed a bug where Snowball was unusable after using Aurora's R to kill a target.
Brawl
We launched Brawl with minimal balance changes in order to understand the mode's balance needs, and we're thrilled to see so many players having a blast in the Bandlewood. We've also seen a lot of requests for champion balance, and we're excited to deliver a major balance update to help ensure that all classes and champions feel viable in Brawl. We released a hotfix shortly after launch to address the most and least powerful champions (notes included further down), and now we're further balancing outlier champions and boosting cooldowns for champions whose numbers didn't make sense in a shorter match. You shouldn't feel like you have to save your ultimate because you can only use it a few times a match, and especially champions with global ultimates don't need such long cooldowns when the map is smaller than Summoner's Rift.
Surrender Time and Long Range Minion Extermination
Something we observed this past week was a comp who managed to win a game from inside their base. While very funny and something we thought might happen at some point, we figured we should fix it now that it's been found out. We wanted to hold off on adding a bunch of rules immediately to Brawl before seeing what was possible, rather than make a bloated rulebook from the jump. Also it's fun to discover and find these things! We're making some changes to this patch so this should no longer be possible, and we expect these changes to have minimal impact on players who are playing the mode normally.
We're also adding a change to the surrender timer by setting it to 15 mins. This should provide a failsafe for teams if a game is ever feeling like it's being held hostage long past where a usual Brawl game ends.
Surrender Timer: 60:00 ⇒ 15:00
You now deal greatly reduced damage to minions if you've spent too long in your base. This debuff can be easily removed by leaving your base, but will be reapplied more quickly afterward to prevent abuse.
We made some changes after the rollout of Brawl so just documenting these in case you've missed them in game! These are currently live.
Akali
Damage Taken: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ 10
Annie
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Azir
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 105%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ 10
Bard
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 105%
Damage Taken: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ 20
Brand
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Draven
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 105%
Damage Taken: 100% ⇒ 90%
Evelynn
Damage Taken: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ 20
Fiddlesticks
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
R Cooldown: 140 / 110 / 80 ⇒ 140 / 130 / 120
Gangplank
Damage Taken: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ 20
Garen
Damage Taken: 100% ⇒ 90%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ 10
Hwei
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Ivern
Healing: 100% ⇒ 95%
Shielding: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Jhin
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Jinx
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Kayle
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Kayn
Assassin Damage Taken: 100% ⇒ 95%
Assassin Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ 10
Kog'Maw
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
LeBlanc
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ 10
Lee Sin
Damage Taken: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ 10
Lucian
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 105%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ 10
Lux
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Malzahar
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Maokai
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Master Yi
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Mel
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Morgana
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Senna
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 105%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ 10
Sett
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Shaco
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Smolder
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Swain
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Sylas
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 105%
Damage Taken: 100% ⇒ 95%
Teemo
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
R Cooldown: 35 / 30 / 25 ⇒ 40 / 35 / 30
Tryndamere
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 105%
Damage Taken: 100% ⇒ 95%
Veigar
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Xerath
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Ziggs
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Zyra
Damage Dealt: 100% ⇒ 95%
Ability Haste: 0 ⇒ -10
Bugfixes & QoL Changes
QoL Changes
Pyke's E Phantom charge up and dash sound effects now follow the positioning of the phantom.
Pyke now has a new passive heal loop sound effect.
Made Akali's Q more consistent when aiming in different directions.
Bugfixes
Fixed self only Pyke R cast audio positioning for several Pyke skins.
Fixed an issue where Fiddlesticks's Q could not be applied again to the same target as soon as it came off cooldown.
Fixed an issue where Naafiri's Passive dogs could run around the map globally. This did prompt us to ask “What da dawgs doin?”
Fixed an issue where Naafiri's R would not be blocked by Azir's R.
Fixed an issue where champions under… weird… circumstances could gain an infinite amount of XP. (Yes we saw the video too)
Fixed an issue where the Death Spectate feature was not available in Practice Tool, Swiftplay, and certain game modes.
Fixed an issue where the Rift Herald would sometimes walk to the closest enemy structure and charge at it after failing to hit anything from the controlled charge.
Fixed an issue where Sixth Sense could trigger while dead. We didn't see this twist coming either.
Fixed an issue where Nimbus Cloak wouldn't activate after a long teleport.
Fixed an issue where chat pings could show an incorrect bounty instead of the actual bounty on the scoreboard.
Fixed an issue where some champions' Critical Strikes could go through Blind.
Fixed an issue where the Rift Herald could auto charge through terrain but not damage the tower. Rift Herald will now respect all walls, even ones you make.
Fixed an issue where Kraken Slayer would create a redundant debuff icon.
Fixed an issue where if a dead player disconnected and reconnected the Death Screen UI would be invisible.
Fixed an issue where Yasuo would do excessive damage to K'Sante when he is in his R and has Aftershock.
Fixed an issue where if Vi had Guardian Angel and was killed during her R the R would not be interrupted.
Fixed an issue where Sion's Q and Briar's E could be cancelled by attack moves.
Fixed an issue where you could ignore the ARAM Low Priority Queue after AFKing and remaking the game.
Fixed an issue where the ghostly outline of Pyke's W would fail to appear when damage was taken while camouflaged.
Fixed an issue where Kled could be executed by Collector while mounted if the killing blow would exceed his total combined HP.
Fixed an issue where Zilean's second Q timer on the same target wouldn't have a countdown SFX.
Fixed an issue where Mordekaiser's Q would cast toward the mouse location and not the direction he's facing if he's displaced.
Skin Updates
This patch we decided to go back and deliver some meaningful updates to the Black Rose skins that were released earlier this year. We wanted to make these feel a bit more exciting to use and hope you enjoy these updates!
Masque of the Black Rose Vladimir
Model and texture updates.
VFX kit updated with more of that Black Rose flavor.
Now using the new Vlad recall.
Masque of the Black Rose Samira
Model and texture updates.
VFX kit updated with more of that Black Rose flavor.
Masque of the Black Rose Renata Glasc
Model and texture updates.
VFX kit updated with more of that Black Rose flavor.
Masque of the Black Rose Elise
Model and texture updates.
Entirely new VFX as it previously was just using her base VFX kit (also full of Black Rose flavor).
Passive - Deathbringer Stance
Q - The Darkin Blade
W - Infernal Chains
W - Incinerate
Q - Ranger's Focus
Passive - Moonsilver Blade
Passive - Spider Queen
W - Courage
E - Judgment
R - Demacian Justice
E - Force Pulse
R - Riftwalk
E - Relentless Pursuit
R - Thrill of the Hunt
W - Rune Prison
R - Realm Warp
W - Ricochet
Q - Flair
W - Blade Whirl
R - Inferno Trigger
Q - Wild Cards
E - Contaminate
R - Wingborne Storm
Horizon Focus