Highlights from League of Legends 6.3 patch

Riot has released the League of Legends patch notes for patch 6.3, and they hold some pretty big changes for the game. It’s a hefty patch, with tons of new stuff to sift through — if you want the full litany of changes, head over to the official notes here. For just the highlights, here are some of the bigger changes we saw:

New Item

First, there’s a new item: the Duskblade of Draktharr. This fancy new item is made especially for AD assassins. Riot is calling it a ‘core item’ for assassins — something they haven’t had since Last Whisper was changed. The item grants 75 attack damage – on par with Bloodthirster – but only costs 3250 gold. For comparison, Bloodthirster costs 3700 gold. Not only that, but you also get bonus movement speed, as well as armor penetration — useful stats for an assassin.

The most interesting part of the new item, however, is the Nightfall ability:

That’s gonna hurt. 

Champion Changes

While various champions were buffed and nerfed, one of the bigger changes was to Alistar. For many, the Headbutt and Pulverize combo is this champion’s bread and butter — but Riot felt that too often people missed the combo, even at the pro level. They’ve now made it so Pulverize can be ‘buffered’ during Headbutt and will automatically go off once Alistar reaches his target. 

Some other champion highlights:

• Graves was the focus of a few minor changes, like not being able to stun the Rift Scuttler with normal attacks anymore.
• Ryze benefits from a significant cool down reduction on his ultimate. 
• Gragas’ Drunken Rage’s on-hit now deals damage in a 250 unit radius around the primary target.
• Corgi’s base damage on Phosphorous Bomb has been reduced.

Chasing the Dragon

Major changes are coming to Dragon as well. Riot felt that people weren’t treating Dragon as a necessary objective towards the end of games. In order to fix that, they decided to change the buffs on the 2nd and 4th Dragons:

Theoretically, this should make going for those late-game Dragons worth it, since the buffs will help with late-game tower dives and split-pushing.

Changing Champion Select

Lastly, Riot is instituting some new wrinkles to Champion Select. Coming with the new patch is the rule that free-to-play champions are no longer allowed in ranked matches. After the initial patch, Riot is also planning to institute the following rules as well:

For all the patch notes, check out the patch notes page. You can expect the patch to go live sometime this week.

What do you think about all the changes coming to LoL? Let us know down below.