THIS IS THE YEAR WE HIT OUR RANKED GOALS!

Welcome to the 2024 Season! Split 1 kickoff is quickly approaching, so make sure to read up on all the changes coming in 14.1 to get ready. THIS IS THE YEAR WE HIT OUR RANKED GOALS! This year we’re starting off strong with a big gameplay update! We’vegot Voidgrubs,Voidmites, Voidborn Monsters, three Baron Nashor forms each with their own BaronPit, map changes to every lane and jungle, over 100 item changes (including newitems), a Hwei buff, dynamic music, new in-game quests, FIST BUMPS, and a lotmore!

Patch Highlights

Dragonmancer Kassadin, Dragonmancer Rakan, Dragonmancer Fiora, Dragonmancer Vayne, and Prestige Dragonmancer Rakan will be available January 10, 2024 at 19:00 UTC.

Ranked Season 2024
SPLIT 1 KICKOFF

Welcome to the 2024 Ranked Season! We’re going to be kicking off the first split of the year in this patch with ranked queues opening on January 10th. For those that missed the ranked queues closing details in the last patch notes you can read those here.

Season 2024 Split 1 starts at 12:00:00 January 10, 2024 according to regional local time everywhere except for LA1 and NA1:
⦁ LA1 starts at 9am, Jan 10 CST
⦁ NA1 starts at 7am, Jan 10 PST

Region Time Zone Season Start Local Time
OC1 Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
JP1 Japan Standard Time (JST) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
KR1 Korea Standard Time (KST) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
RU Moscow Standard Time (MSK) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
EUN1 Central European Time (CET) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
TR1 Time zone in Istanbul, Turkey (GMT+3) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
EUW1 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
BR1 Time zone in São Paulo, Brazil (GMT-3) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
LA2 Time zone in Buenos Aires, Argentina (GMT-3) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
LA1 Central Standard Time (CST) Jan/10/2024 9:00:00
NA1 Pacific Standard Time (PST) Jan/10/2024 7:00:00
PH Philippine Standard Time Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
VN Indochina Time (GMT+7) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
SG Singapore Standard Time (GMT+8) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
TH Indochina Time (GMT+7) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00
TW Taipei Standard Time (GMT+8) Jan/10/2024 12:00:00

The season transition experience will be similar to what we had in the past: Ranked queues will be disabled for a couple of hours, and will be brought back as soon as 14.1 is up, and a couple of hours after that, Split 1 will be officially launched! The ranked games played during the downtime won’t count towards your new season progression.

Shard transfers will be disabled before season end, and re-enabled after all end of season rewards are granted.

SEASON 2023: SPLIT 2 RANKED REWARDS

For those who earned it, Victorious Tryndamere will be the reward for the 2023 Split 2 season! We mentioned it in one of our recent Dev Updates but this skin will be a little delayed so you should expect him to appear on your accounts in a few patches. We wanted to make sure we had a unique skin for each split so we opted to take some time to ensure those that participated in split 2 received a different reward than split 1. We’ll add it to the notes on the patch that should happen as well, right now we’re targeting patch 14.4, and we’ll update you if anything changes there.

As for the remaining rewards (of which you can see the details on our Ranked Rewards support article) those should be delivered onto your accounts in 14.2 and we’ve validated the results.

Void Gameplay Changes

In case you missed this one as well, we released a dev blog late last year to offer players a helping hand when it comes to learning about the Void changes coming this patch, /dev: Cat Cults, Rift Mechs, and Baron’s Revamp here! If you’re interested in how we refined these changes OR if the idea of seeing 11 adorable cats combining their forces to seal Rift Herald appeals to you, give it a read!

Disclaimer: Void Event not included

VOIDGRUBS, VOIDMITES, AND THE HUNGER OF THE VOID

We’ve got some brand new residents moving into the Baron pit this season: the Voidgrubs and Voidmites. These Voidborn beasties are a new horde objective that will be taking the place of the first Rift Herald each game. Our goal with Voidgrubs was to provide tower pushing pressure in contrast to dragon buff’s ramping threat, but spread it out more evenly across all lanes. We also wanted to give players gradual, persistent power throughout the entire game, as opposed to the old Shelly whose power was more instant and would sometimes simply end the laning phase. In addition, its multiple spawn nature means that mid or top laners who have pushed out their lane can sneak one without needing to commit the full time it would take to clear an entire epic objective. But let’s jump into the details!
⦁ Three Voidgrubs spawn at 5 minutes into the game.
⦁ Each Voidgrub will spawn 4 Voidmites every 12 seconds in combat.
⦁ Voidgrubs can respawn once per game as each one has their own individual respawn timer of 4 minutes, so feel free to just take one and walk away.
⦁ On death, Voidgrubs will give other nearby Voidgrubs a 25% Maximum Health + 25% Missing Health shield that decays over 10 seconds.
⦁ Killing one Voidgrub grants the player and allied teammates one stack of the Hunger of the Void Buff, which causes your non-proc attacks to deal bonus true damage to structures over 4 seconds. This damage will scale with the number of Voidgrubs slain at a rate of 4 (melee) / 3 (ranged) true damage every 0.5 seconds per stack.
⦁ Once your team hits 5 stacks of the buff, you will spawn 1 Voidmite to help when attacking towers (15 second cooldown). At 6 stacks the amount of Voidmites is increased to 2. Voidmites summoned by players have the same stats as a melee minion, but with 40% less health and 50% more movespeed.
⦁ Voidgrubs despawn at 13:45 in-game time (or 13:55 if Voidgrubs are in combat) to make way for Rift Herald.
⦁ The first Voidgrub taken per spawn group* will count as an epic takedown reward for the first one you participate in killing. For example, Cho’Gath can get one epic monster stack from the first Voidgrub he kills in the first spawn group, and then one more if he kills a Voidgrub that spawned in the second group. (*The Voidgrubs that spawn at 5 minutes are the first spawn group, and once slain the Voidgrubs that replace them are the second spawn group.)

VOIDGRUBS
⦁ Health: 250 (+250 per minute of game time)
⦁ Attack Damage: 10 (+2.5 per minute of game time)
⦁ Attack Speed: 0.5
⦁ Armor: 0
⦁ Magic Resistance: 0
⦁ Movement Speed: 350
⦁ Attack Range: 500 units
⦁ Experience: 75 (+2% per level over 4) (Level is calculated as the average level of champions in the game, rounded up)
⦁ Gold Given on Takedown: 20 gold to the killer + 10 gold per player (including killer)

VOIDMITES (WHEN SUMMONED BY VOIDGRUBS)
⦁ Health: 20 (+40 per minute of game time)
⦁ Attack Damage: 6 (+0.5 per minute of game time)
⦁ Attack Speed: 2
⦁ Armor: 0
⦁ Magic Resistance: 0
⦁ Movement Speed: 420
⦁ Attack Range: 125
⦁ Experience: 0
⦁ Gold Given on Takedown: 1 gold to killer

REVAMPED RIFT HERALD

Rift Herald is back and they have a brand new, Voidgrub-inspired look! But this isn’t just a surface level change, because Herald also has some changes under the hood… err, shell?
⦁ If you or an allied teammate summon the Rift Herald, one player (either the user or a teammate) can right click the Herald in order to hop onto Shelly. Right clicking any direction while channeling onto Herald will allow the player to pick where Herald will start charging. While charging, players can steer the Rift Herald while she charges forward (similar to a Sion ultimate).
⦁ The Rift Herald receives 1 use of Charge when summoned which is consumed as soon as a player hops onto Herald (or when Herald automatically Charges a tower unpiloted). In the event a nearby enemy tower or inhibitor is destroyed, Herald will receive an additional Charge. This Charge (and cooldown) is displayed on Rift Herald’s health bar.
⦁ The Charge lasts for up to 14 seconds, starting at 150 movement speed and ramping up to 600 movement speed over 5 seconds (this is increased by 75% when charging towards an enemy tower). The charge will end upon collision with a structure or terrain, reducing the Herald’s health by 66% and ejecting the player 200 (+75% of player’s attack range) units in the opposite direction of the charge. In the event Herald’s Charge hits a live tower the ejection distance is increased to 700 (+75% of player’s attack range) units.
⦁ If a player steers the Rift Herald through enemies (including champions), the enemy will receive 250 true damage and be knocked airborne.
⦁ If a player steers the Rift Herald into an enemy structure a bonus 2000 (+0-750 based on average champion level) damage will be dealt to the structure, 5 (+ the number of Hunger of the Void stacks of the user) Voidmites will be spawned to attack the tower, and the player will gain a temporary shield.
⦁ NEWRift Herald now has Baron’s Gaze which reduces damage taken from the last enemy attacked by 50%.
⦁ Empowered Recall: The holder gains Empowered Recall until the Eye is used/expires ⇒ All allied champions who assisted in killing Herald gain a single completed use of Empowered Recall
⦁ Sharing (Gold) is Caring: Rift Herald grants any gold it gains from turrets/turret plates to the player that summoned them (if they weren’t around) ⇒ Rift Herald grants any gold it gains from turrets/turret plates to all champions who assisted in killing the Herald
⦁ NEWAuto Cast: Upon expiring, the Eye of the Herald will auto-cast with no channel time and summon Rift Herald. In the event your champion is currently dead, the Herald will spawn in your team’s fountain.

Rift Herald (Note: Unchanged)
⦁ Health: 7125-14250 (based on level)
⦁ Attack Damage: 99.5-250 (based on level)
⦁ Attack Speed: 0.4
⦁ Armor: 60
⦁ Magic Resistance: 50
⦁ Movement Speed: 325
⦁ Attack Range: 250
⦁ Experience: 306-320 (based on level)
⦁ Gold Given on Takedown: 100 gold to killer, 100 local gold

VOIDBORN SENTINEL, BRAMBLEBACK, AND…. SCUTTLER?

Once Baron Nashor emerges onto the Rift at 20 minutes, the next time Blue Sentinel and Red Brambleback respawn they will rise again as Voidborn Sentinel and Voidborn Brambleback respectively with 30% more health. This transformation also comes with increased durability making them harder to take down, but fret not because this extra effort is worth it! Now, once slain, Blue and Red will grant their buffs to the entire team of the player that takes them down (excluding any allies that were dead).

Speaking of Blue and Red, their respective buffs are also getting some changes! (Note: These adjustments apply to both the base Sentinel and Brambleback as well as their Voidborn counterparts.
⦁ Crest of Insight (Blue Buff): 5/10/15/20 Haste ⇒ 10 Haste
⦁ Crest of Cinders (Red Buff): 0.5/1/3/5% Max Health Regeneration (levels 1/4/6/11) ⇒ 0.5/1/3% Max Health Regeneration (levels 1/4/6)
⦁ When the buffs become Voidborn they no longer transfer to opponents upon the owner’s death (mainly to prevent giant messes with everyone having buffs all the time)

Similarly, after 20 minutes once Rift Scuttler rises again after being slain, she will be Voidborn Scuttler. When slain, Voidborn Scuttler will send out a massive Scryer’s Bloom effect, revealing all champions and wards in a large surrounding area. Similar to Scryer’s, all wards revealed this way will be reduced to 1 HP.
BARON NASHOR

Would it really be a set of Void-related changes without Baron Nashor himself? It’s been quite a while since Baron last received a visual update, let alone one with three new, terrifying forms! Introducing them from left to right, we have the All-Seeing Baron, Hunting Baron, and finally the Territorial Baron.

The Baron dance is one as old as time, but over the years, the Baron fight has gotten somewhat stale with players hyper optimizing every aspect of it. It’s also not aged well as our premier epic monster, the kind of monster that makes you say “Wow that’s an epic monster.” Our goal here is to update Baron’s visuals while freshening up his fight a bit using new terrain and spells so that it takes a bit of new mastery and adaptability game to game.

Each form of Baron Nashor will have a unique move at their disposal, so make sure to prepare accordingly!
⦁ Hunting Baron: Baron calls a pillar of lightning over every nearby enemy. After 0.7 seconds they begin to strike, delayed by 0.1 second per strike. These deal 15% of the target’s current health.
⦁ All-Seeing Baron: Baron summons rifts toward the two furthest enemies he can see within 2200 units. These last for 3 seconds and deal 150 magic damage on the first hit, and 50 damage for every subsequent hit.
⦁ Territorial Baron: Baron reaches out, after 1.5 seconds he grabs all enemies in a cone, pulling them 300 units and dealing 75 magic damage to them.

Baron Nashor
⦁ Health: 11400 (+180 per minute from game start)
⦁ Attack Damage: 350 (+ 10 per minute from spawn) (Note: AD will cap at 520)
⦁ Attack Speed: 0.625
⦁ Armor: 120
⦁ Magic Resistance: 70
⦁ Movement Speed: 300 lol
⦁ Attack Range: 955
⦁ Experience: 600 to all contributors plus 800 distributed among nearby allied teammates
⦁ Gold Given on Takedown: 25 gold to killer, 300 per allied player
BARON TERRAIN VARIATIONS

Fighting around Baron has been essentially unchanged since Baron got his last VGU, so we thought it was time to add a little bit more interest to his fight game to game. While Baron is still a fun and interesting objective to have on the map, over time players have effectively “solved” how to take him down. And where’s the fun in that? This should help shake things up between games so now each game you’ll be challenged to think about exactly how you can take advantage of each Baron pit.
Hunting Baron Pit

This is the baseline Baron pit, but why fix what isn’t broken? His new spell in this pit punishes grouped up enemies so make sure to distance properly.

Territorial Baron Pit

A rifft on the baseline pit, it’s easier to disengage from enemies in this variation, but flanks are also faster. His new spell in this pit can punish heavy grouping to disincentivize grouping on a single side.

All-Seeing Baron Pit

This is the most different from the pit of today, it’s much riskier to access Baron from the river in this variation with new strong flank and flee angles. His new spell in this pit goes far and controls zones locking up some of the free new space that he’s made here.
Terrain Changes
In case you missed it we released a dev blog late last year digging into these terrain changes, /Dev: Season 2024 Map Changes here! We recommend checking out the entire thing if you’re curious about how we landed on these changes.

We’ve got a few different goals with the map changes this season. At the highest level, our goal is to make lanes more fair across sides. Red and blue sides have very different advantages in a lane with respect to how to gank them, how fights play out, how you can posture against the brush or river, etc. These differences will still exist, but in lesser ways. For example, top lane red side won’t feel nearly so exposed when pushing up, so you don’t need to be a safer laner to exist when the champ select gods put you red side.

The second goal of the map changes was specifically around making solo lanes a bit more protected from junglers, or roamers generally. Ganking as a primary early game output was just too strong in most cases. Each lane had a slightly different reason for their changes however. Let’s take a quick dive into those now!
TOP SIDE

Top lane is in a constant push and pull between players wanting more influence and output over the rest of the map in the lane, and also being substantially less influenced by the other roles, especially early on. For most players, the lane simultaneously feels entirely at the mercy of your jungler (or roaming support in higher skill levels) and also unable to do anything to win the game except with major leads.

With these changes we’re substantially reducing the ability for other lanes to affect top in the early game, letting the 1v1 fight really shine. It’s not like the jungler won’t be able to gank at all, so still watch out. We’re also shifting top brush into a pixel in the center of the river so it’s less side-skewed and substantially more powerful when contested. It tends to be correct to ward outside of the river brush on live in many cases and while this still remains true to an extent, this brush is closer to an optimal warding position and is less potent for ganking than before.

Also, an extension of the jungler influence on top lane was early Rift Herald. More often than not, Rift Herald was dropped in top lane (it’s closest to her lair after all), and she absolutely destroys any laning phase that might exist. What’s a tower to a crab god? Shelly regularly invalidated laning phases by destroying towers and adding giant influxes of gold to a specific laner, usually entirely at the jungler’s whim. We’ve seen that quite often both top laners are dissatisfied with lanes breaking apart this early—the behind player being put into the dumpster, and the ahead player not having any more time to play with their lead. By pushing back Rift Herald, we’re intending to substantially reduce the volatility of the late laning phase top lane experience. Dovetailing off the objective space, one of our goals with the new Voidgrubs objective is that top laners will have a lot more agency in affecting the outcome of the early top side objective than before. We’re also making the top side objective more potent for team-wide success than previously so that their early leads can matter more for the team. We’ll go more into the Voidgrubs down below, but overall we’re aiming to give top laners a lane more protected from outside influence while making their lane more important for the team’s overall chances of victory.
MID

Mid lane was a similar set of changes for some slightly different goals. It is the lane (on live) with by far the most access for ganking, and one thing we’ve noticed is that over the years players have learned just how unsafe the lane is for a lot of our more immobile champions without great self-peel. The Zyras and Brands and Karthuses of League have felt like the midlane was no longer able to be their home as more and more high-agency characters appeared and junglers learned just how easy it was to punish these immobile mages.

Our main goal here was to make mid substantially safer for this class of characters at a fundamental level. Opening up midlane to be mage-forward should give us a real role for this class again. The goal is not at all to push assassins out of this lane, just make it more hospitable for immobile characters with respect to their ability to face junglers. They’re still definitely gankable, but should be a bit less so than they are currently.

The other main change for mid was to open up roam paths that are a little bit safer. Each side will have a path players can roam along that requires putting themselves at substantially less risk to get to river or even the respective lane they’re roaming to. We’re pushing out the mid lane brush for the same reasons. Providing mid laners with about 20% more time after seeing an enemy before they can get into actionable range should give substantially less power to early ganks and much more safety to these immobile characters.

Mid lane, at its core, is a lane that requires some amount of roaming to support junglers or side lanes. And in the current state of League, the mid laners who don’t have the agency to safely roam feel invalidated by the role. Altogether our goal here is to lower the requirements to a functional mid laner across champions so that we can support a wider roster of champions there, particularly immobile mages and their like. We are definitely not trying to push champions out of the role though and will definitely be balancing to follow up here, especially since there are surely a number of high-agency mages who will benefit a lot and be overbearing at the start.
BOT SIDE

Bot lane is getting a smaller set of changes visually, but we definitely still expect them to be quite impactful overall. Just like top lane, we’re adding parity across sides so that entrances to lane and brush positions are matched roughly equally across sides.

These changes open up a new gank pathway through bottom red jungle and are among our riskiest changes to the map. We’re reducing gank potency elsewhere while nominally increasing it bot lane, so we’ll be watching this portion of the map very closely to ensure that it’s still reasonable and enjoyable. Red side bot lane is now particularly more vulnerable than before (as opposed to blue side) because it doesn’t have the extra distance created from Dragon pit walls to give more time for responding to action on vision or even just to slightly delay movement from river.

This new gank pathway also doesn’t allow for as easy contesting of vision in its tri brush because of the relatively easier access from river. It’s a difficult spot on the map for us to balance and one we’ll look at closely. The center of river brush should also be more of a focal point to contest as compared to before as it has deeper river control than the old brush and is less side-skewed.

This brush should be substantially worse for ganking red-side bot lane when unwarded, however. On live, the river brush gives near unfettered access to lane and this power is brought down to mitigate the concerns around gankability of red-side bot lane. Notably, this brush does cover access to the red tri brush from river to protect your bot lane from all but the deepest wraparound ganks.
JUNGLE

Finally, we adjusted the geometry in the jungle to support these lane adjustments and add a lot of new interest to Dragon and Baron fights. Access to these epic monster fights on live is relatively easy through a major choke point opposite the monster, or minor chokepoints deeper into river or the jungle further out.

The latest adjustments aim to shift away from a single choke point and focus combat around multiple entries, as well as generally overhaul how these fights play out as this space is quite solved and players are very used to this macro. Contesting should be a little bit more equal across sides as it currently tends to advantage the team who can comfortably engage and escape from an objective.

These adjustments as noted above also do help roaming quite a bit as there’s a safe secondary path for both teams that doesn’t involve any jungle movement. All in all, our goal is that junglers should have a harder time ganking, especially early, but shouldn’t feel like they have no more agency over the game.
Infernal Terrain Changes
Given the terrain changes we’ve introduced in 14.1, we also need to adjust some Drakes so that they’ll play nicely with all of the new walls (or lack thereof). This includes moving a few small walls and brushes for Mountain and Ocean Drake.

However, after we spent so much time building walls across the rift we took a step back to look at Infernal’s map changes again, which led to the following changes:
⦁ NEWInfernal Cinders spawn randomly on the map in small groups, with a higher likelihood of spawning towards the losing team. Picking up a naturally spawned Infernal Cinder grants a small burst of movement speed and grants an Infernal Cinder stack.
⦁ NEWInfernal Cinder stacks grant 0.3 Ability Haste per stack. On death, up to 5 Cinders can be maintained, with some of the remainder being dropped on the ground and the rest being destroyed. Cinders dropped from player deaths do not grant the burst of movement speed upon pickup.
⦁ REMOVEDInfernal Rift will no longer destroy any walls on the Rift.

We wanted to experiment with these changes after considering player feedback about the Infernal Rift being the least interesting in terms of gameplay. Our goal is that this will help us create more interesting map states beyond just terrain changes like the current Hextech and Chemtech. That said, we’ll keep a close eye on how these changes land and how players like them.