LoL Patch 14.24 – Final patch before Season 15 brings minor changes

Patch 14.24 will be the last patch of the year, and it comes with its fair share of minor adjustments. Riot Games is making a point of slightly rebalancing some specific champions’ kits to conclude 2024. The patch is already out on the PBE, and will be live on the official servers from 11 December. It will remain effective until 7 January: the start date of Season 15.

Ambessa gets minor nerfs

Ambessa has made quite a name for herself since her arrival on the Rift. I would not say she is “K’Sante release” tier, but she is for sure up there with the broken modern champions. You can definitely expect to see her a lot in pro plays next year.

W – Repudiation:

• Shield duration: 2s ⇒ 1.5s
• Shield strength: 85 – 350 + 1.75 Bonus AD ⇒ 50 – 320 + 1.5 bonus AD

E – Lacerate:

• Bonus AD ratio: 4.8 ⇒ 4.6

Her kit is centered around dashes, and she can access the backline way too easily with her ultimate. This nerf – mostly on her W – was needed, the shield size was way too big especially in early game. This spell was giving her too much edge for unmatched trades, particularly in laning phase. She is quite hard to punish already because of her countless dashes, this shield’s nerf will give slightly more space for her opponent to trade with her. Overall, Riot is happy with how she’s landed and “will continue to make sure she still has counterplay even when using her kit well”.

Viktor’s rework and controversial visual update

Viktor has vanished from the competitive scene for a while. Not only that, but he also has bad statistics at high elo with less than 47% winrate at Master+ level. This is not what Riot wants, especially for one of their Arcane stars… So in addition to his visual update, they will also give him a small rework – which is mostly made of buffs – for the next patch.

Passive – Glorious Evolution:

• Grant: 5 stacks per cannon and 25 per takedown ⇒  10 stacks per cannon and 20 per takedown

Q – Siphon Power:

• Flat shield: 25 – 105 ⇒  40 – 115

W – Gravity Field:

• Stun variably after 1.1s – 2s in the zone ⇒ Stun consistently after 1.25s in the zone

R –  Chaos Storm

• Can now evolve and increase in radius and duration on every takedown

In my opinion, it was also needed, not only to promote their game through the series, but also to give this hard-to-manoeuvre scaling mage a little helping hand. If you are not comfortable with farming, you should now give up on playing Viktor though. His passive will now have more scaling through farming and less through fighting, which is great because some Viktor mains tended to flip an early fight in order to get their passive upgrades. The “bug” on his W will now be resolved, and it should definitely help him to punish some enemies overextensions, even though a lot of Viktor enjoyers are still protesting for a complete overhaul of this spell.

His new ultimate will also help him become a bigger threat on objective and late-game teamfights. He should now make his come back among the family of control midlane mages that can be played on a more or less consistent basis in the competitive scene, along with Orianna, Hwei, Azir and Taliyah to name but a few.

Adjustments on other champions

Some other less impactful changes will occcur with this new patch, especially for Warwick and Master Yi but even with those buffs, they should never be played in pro games anyway because of their original kits. However, good luck to the average/low elo players in soloqueue, because these buffs might unleash their full potential either as a 1v9 champion when ahead, with the Crit build coming back for Master Yi, or as an unkillable constant threatening dog running and hitting you at full speed for Warwick…

Poppy is also receiving some interesting nerf to her kit in early game, that will now scale better. The Yordle is indeed way too overpowered in the first few levels, especially when she is played toplane. It’s a bit too hard to out trade her with her grasp and passive perma poking you, and her Q shreading almost half of your HPs when you dare getting close to her…