5 Things You Need to Know About League of Legends Patch 6.16

Jarrettjawn
Gaming News
Gaming News

Probably one of the softest League of Legends patches in what seems like forever, 6.16 focuses narrowly on particular high priority picks and supports. With the Road to Worlds rapidly approaching, we can probably treat this as the calm before the international storm. Here are the juiciest bits.

1. SKT T1 Skins are live!

Earlier this Spring, the tradition of immortalizing past World Championship winners in the form of skins was to continue. When the skins were revealed, however, the community was very underwhelmed. They were so vocal with their disappointment that Riot went back to the drawing board. Now, they’ve debuted the new looks, and they’re pretty spiffy.

The champions selected for the skin treatments are usually based on their relationships with the team members being commemorated. In this case,  the starting line up of Elise (Bengi), Kalista (Bang), Alistar (Wolf), Renekton (MaRin), and Ryze (Faker). Also added to represent midlane sub Eazyhoon is an Azir skin, which is arguably the freshest of all the freshness.

2. Sona Nerfs

Sona’s rework from 6.14 has supercharged her win rate in ways probably not expected. She went from feeling pretty lame to play, to feeling like a goddess among mere mortals in just a couple of months. Riot likes that she’s scaled into this dramatically dangerous utility support. They just aren’t so fond of her doing it so early.

To curtail her rapid rise to unbreakable bottom lane support deity, Sona’s Crescendo lowers her ability cooldowns at much lower rates in its first two levels than it used to- from 20/30/40% to 10/25/40%. These are pretty big dips, but as they take other forms of CDR into account (runes, masteries, items, etc.) the change isn’t so brutal that it can’t be supported in your builds somewhere. If you want to over commit to CDR, though, you’ll be doing so at the expense of your AP.

To make her easy to punish throughout the game, Song of Clarity’s movement speed buffs have been nerfed. She can buff herself by 10/11/12/13/14% now, down from 13/14/15/16/17%. The aura her allies get buffed by has been trimmed, too, from a ration of .8 of her AP to .6.

 

3. New Irelia Passive

Irelia is the queen of comebacks, mechanically speaking. Very few champions are built to fight multiple assailants as competently as her, and early in the season, she was a big time top lane pick because of it. She’s always a challenge in lane, and catching a roaming Irelia alone isn’t a guarenteed victory by any stretch.

Part of that is because of her passive, Ionian Fervor, which grants her Tenacity based on how many enemies are nearby. The more you pile on a lonesome Irelia, the less vulnerable she is to crowd control. With her own stuns and true damage abilities, she makes a great one-on-one duelist, but the Tenacity boost made her a great team fighter, too. She’s not exactly squishy, either. Something had to be done.

To pull her more in line with her lore (and game health) Irelia’s passive has be reworked to reflect the “against all odds” nature of the character. Now, instead of granting Tenacity based only on how many enemies are nearby, Irelia gets a boost based on the amount of enemies nearby compared to the amount of allies nearby. If your team has the number advantage, there is no buff. When you’re even, its 10%. When there are more enemies than allies, the buff becomes 25/30/35/40% depending on level (1/6/11/16). The range for what constitutes “nearby” is also shorter now, from 1400 to 1000 units. Long range snipers won’t count against Irelia when she makes her miraculous dives now.

4. A Naughtier Nautilus

Nerfed into obscurity in Season 6, Nautilus has been searching for some love for awhile. When his base damage was higher, he was a hard support to ignore. And even though no big tank deals out multi-target disruption quite like him, Nautilus’s place on the bench stays well occupied.

Taking a small step towards pushing him back onto the field, Riot has buffed his ultimate in two ways. Now, when passing through champions who aren’t the primary target, Depth Charge stuns them as well, to the tune of 1/1.5/2 seconds in addition to the knock-up that previously occurred. On top of that, the knock up is now half a second longer. This rewards Nautilus players for trying to get the most bang for their 100 mana.

5. Viktor Adjustments

Fewer mages have seen such a raucous comeback in standard play like Viktor has. Patch 6.9 re-balanced his Chaos Storm to be more dangerous over time instead of a big bang up front, and he’s ridden it all the way back into the spotlight. The thing about the spotlight, though, is that once you make it there, everyone wants to ask “Why?” and put you back in your place. Haters, man.

The damage portion of Chaos Storm isn’t being touched here, though. With it being controllable and all, the movement needs to be refined so that getting caught in the storm doesn’t make death feel inevitable. Or at least so Viktor has to be reasonably present to do the deed. Storm’s maximum movement speed is down to 400 from 450, though the minimum movement speed is up to 200 from 170. The decay in speed starts sooner, at 300 units away from Viktor instead of 350 and the minimum speed is capped at 900 instead of 950. Let’s hope this presents Viktor with more risk to accompany all that reward.

If you want to know more about patch 6.16, check out Riot’s Patch Notes on their blog. Drop by the Leaguepedia to keep up on all the pro-League action. And don’t forget to let us know what you think about the changes on Twitter or Facebook.