League of Legends developers revealed future changes of patch 25.S1.4 (previously 15.4). A dozen champions were nerfed and buffed, including Rakan, Yasuo, Gangplank, Hwei, and Lulu. The latest addition to the character pool, Mel Medarda, was readjusted. The list was published by Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison on X.
The lead gameplay designer explained what they wanted to change about Mel Medarda and promised changes to her range and "reliability".
For Mel, we are looking at some changes to this patch to reduce her frustration, by bringing down her range and reliability slightly, lowering the forgiveness on her W a bit, now that players have had time to learn her, reducing her rank 1 root duration and making her R damage more dependent on having stacks. Mel sports a pretty low winrate on her first game in particular, but after players have played a few games, this rapidly increases.
Tank Items
After an extended period last year of being quite weak and unsatisfying, tank items have found their footing in a strong way, especially for normal play but also at high levels for some of them.
A lot of tanks in those times were opting into things like Thornmail 2nd item (in particular), which indicated that they didn’t really have any good item choices. Being able to opt into specialized items like Thornmail 2nd sometimes is OK, but it feels pretty unsatisfying when it’s the option in most games, especially when playing against magic damage compositions.
Unending Despair was reworked to be this second baseline item to allow players to pivot off this foundation if an option is better (eg. MR heavy vs magic, AR heavy vs phys).
From our player surveys, champs like Mundo, Kench, Skarner, K’Sante, who prominently use these items and are high on "perceived strength," will be nerfed.
Patch 25.S1.4 will come out on February 20, 2025. Note that the update will be released on Thursday instead of the traditional Wednesday. As always, there will be a detailed preview of the update tomorrow, February 21 with stats and possible tweaks to this list.