Trending
The biggest update surrounded items and runes, which both received some impactful changes. Riot wants players to have more diversity in builds, re-enable older playstyles, and make more decisions meaningful in both the early and late game.
There will be three brand new items coming in League of Legends Patch 26.9, each archetypally different from the last.
New Items Bring Fresh Build Options
Doran’s Bow focuses on attack damage and attack speed to allow champion that thrive off of auto attacking and all about early-game trading to dominate in lane.
Its counterpart, Doran’s Helm, wants to push in the opposite direction. This new item focuses on durability, featuring health, armour, magic resist, and bonus minion damage. It’s essentially a flex item that lets players be more defensive in their lane matchups from the get-go.
Gluttonous Greaves are the big reveal here though, serving as a scaling boot option that players will earn more from throughout the game.
On top of movement speed and omnivamp, these boots gain permanent omnivamp stacks on takedowns. Even their Tier 3 upgrade reacts differently to whether you’re healthy or injured, either amplifying your damage or adding extra sustain. They might just be the coolest boots we’ve seen in years.
Statikk Shiv Rework and Item Pool Changes
Riot is reworking Statikk Shiv into a legitimate scaling on-hit item, rather than your go-to waveclearer. The rework grants AD, AP, attack speed, and movement speed, allowing its Energized lightning proc to apply on-hit effects to extra targets.
It’s a small change that should allow for some wild hybrid builds and more fun item combinations moving forward.Riot is also condensing the item pool by removing overlap.
Both Opportunity and Trailblazer are being removed to simplify the item pool, while Staff of Flowing Water will regain its ability haste on its passive. Hubris is also getting tweaked to be less powerful up-front, but gain more potency from stacking.
Rune Overhaul Changes the Meta
Speaking of scaling, let’s talk about runes. There are some sizable buffs and changes to the runes we know and love, drastically shifting the meta in the process.
Deathfire Touch makes a comeback as an offensive keystone rune focused on damage-over-time effects. This is a massive buff to mage champions and any champion that relies heavily on poking their enemies.
Phase Rush, however, will be replaced with Stormraider’s Surge. A highly mobile keystone rune that rewards you for dumping damage, Stormraider’s Surge will only activate after you damage an enemy champion for a large portion of their health within 3 seconds.
No more bailing at the first sign of danger.A few smaller changes to note are Arcane Comet buffing its damage significantly at range, and Hail of Blades giving up some attack speed for extra true damage on empowered attacks.
DON'T MISS:
