My dearest Dragonlands explorers—we’ve got some patch notes to get into!
Lots of changes to discover in 12.12, but the focus here is three-fold: balance the overperformers (and under, but mostly over), lower the power of 1-costs, and increase the speed of combat by reducing the durability of various traits and units.
Good to see you back so soon!
The current meta is “top-heavy” in that a few compositions vastly outperform the rest. Instead of waiting for the next patch on July 13th (pushed back to allow for Riot’s Summer Break), we’re bringing these top performers in line now, while bolstering our most underpowered units and traits. This is a larger than usual mid-patch update and it will have the impact of a full patch in itself.
Astral Soul is one of our weakest Augments, and just doesn’t make sense. Adding +1 to the Astral trait provides no benefit for dropping an Astral unit, when your goal is to three star ALL your units.
Dragonmancer Heart provides far too much value for a Silver Augment, allowing access to Dragonmancer 6 far too early, while also activating additional traits like Jade or Ragewing, leading to very strong mid games.
Currently, units slowly start to move as Assassins jump, allowing those Assasins to hop right onto the carry that you clumped to protect. While this doesn’t happen every time, we want to turn that to a never-y time.
Astral is just insanely weak, even in the early game where it should be strong. Starring up units should be fun—but that fun is cut short with the current power of those units (see next section) and when you don’t hit.
Dragonmancer 6 is the most dominant midgame comp by a wide margin, and it can be played with multiple carry options: Swain, Lee Sin, and Volibear. Hitting Dragonmancer 6 early can make for an unkillable carry that deals a ton of damage—and in the midgame, when you’re too focused on building your own composition to think about building answers to your opponents, it doesn’t feel great. However, by increasing the scaling of the Dragonmancer Blessing, your blessed Hero shouldn’t feel significantly worse later in the game.
Tahm Kench with Trainer is one of the strongest frontline openers in the game. Alongside early access to Revel’s flat damage, the BFF (Big Friendly Frog) composition doesn’t leave much room for competition early on.
Vladimir is the proud winner of the “Most Room to Improve” award in Dragonlands. We’re giving this iron deficient Mage a few buffs so he’ll stop being a thirst trap for Iron players.
We’re shipping a number of changes for our deerest Cavalier that will result in a net buff for Mage (and Cavalier) comps around the Convergence!
No Olaf nerf!?!? Well actually, we did nerf Olaf. Olaf was only oppressive with Assassin compositions, which we hit by nerfing Qiyana, Diana, and the traits: Scalescorn and Assasin.
The nerfs below share a common theme: each of these units currently performs well when slammed into a composition, regardless of their trait benefits or star level (coughs out feathers). We hope these units continue to fly in unique compositions that are built with them in mind—not just in connect-the-dots comps, where the dots are the most powerful units.
Sy’fen seems to have the opposite problem as the units we’ve nerfed in this list. Sy’fen is especially weak at 1-star, and even worse without items, so we’re improving his base numbers to give the Whisper comp the roar it needs!
The Dragonlands are home to a lot of dragon-sized units with talons, wings, and of course, big health bars. Those big health bars have made some items especially effective at taking out the dragons themselves.
In a sea of nerfs, large scale changes, and unit reworks, a couple of our buffs landed too strong.
When we changed Daeja, we wanted her to be a caster where the bulk of her damage came from her large, and more visually impactful, Windblast wave. We like where the wave's damage landed, but there's still too much emphasis on her auto attacks that are amplified by the same builds (Infinity Edge and Jeweled Gauntlet) that make her Wave so powerful. By cutting down her Attack Damage and passive on-hit damage, we can make sure it takes more than a light gust of wind for her to cut down her foes.
Finally, we’re completely pulling the 12.12 buffs to Legend and Volibear’s Relentless Storm (ability), but we’re keeping his Attack Speed buff intact.
In addition to our balance changes, we’ve corrected an error in Shen’s patch notes to reflect the correct values of the Mana nerf and delete the incorrect line showing his Attack Speed change. Those changes are listed below for visibility.
With the removal of the extra phase between Treasure Dragon and 5-1, Hyper Roll players (Hyper Rollers) missed out on the additional XP that that round provided. We’re adding it back to keep the flow of Hyper Roll…hyper.
Wow, three years old—that’s almost old enough to drive!
To celebrate our third anniversary, we’ve got a mission for you to complete and earn Birthday Fluttercake! It bugs me just how cute they are.
Large, like our LP gains.
We’re experimenting with ways to smooth out the awkward transition from one shopping phase (Treasure Dragon) to the next by removing the automatic shop refresh and econ in between Treasure Dragon and the 5-1. This automatic refresh often surprised players more than anything as it defied expectations that every other round of TFT has created. This often led to awkward scenarios of forgetting to lock shop/pick up a unit, or just an awkwardly long timer. This will remove a small amount of extra gold that was generated by this free econ transition.
Don’t make a Dragon pun. Don’t make a Dragon pun. Don’t make a Dragon pun.
We're slightly nerfing many of the frontliners to accelerate the pace of combat in the early and midgame as it’s Drag-oning on too long.
Sigh.
We’re shipping a decent sized nerf to our top-performing verticals while buffing some of the less legendary traits.
With Shimmerscale we’re tweaking a few of the best and worst options to make the trait more consistent.
Many of our Tier 1 units are slightly too strong relative to other tiers, so we're bringing their power in line with their rarity. This is shown in both our Large and Small change sections.
Tahm Kench’s internal cooldown damage reflection lacked in clarity, so we’ve swapped it to reflect damage based on the next 3 attacks that strike him. This should make him more exciting with Revel. Lastly, Tahm Kench at 3-stars was just a bit too tanky, so we’re pulling back the shield strength on the unbenchable frontliner.
Diana is already strong, but also has bugs that are impacting her current power level, so we’re shipping a preemptive nerf alongside several bug fixes that are listed here due to their impact on her power level.
We’re subtracting 10 base Attack Damage from Olaf, but by hitting his base stats, we’re substantially hitting him at two and three stars (as starring up a unit amplifies their base stats by 180% and 320% respectively). This is a 18 AD nerf at two stars and a 32 AD nerf at three stars. As a unit that you want to three stars, this seemingly small nerf is quite heavy.
When paired with the Dragonmancer Blessing’s high Health, Lee Sin casts too frequently due to gaining Mana from taking damage. With how impactful his CC is, we had to put our foot down—by putting Lee Sin’s foot down more often, but when he kicks, expect to feel it to hurt.
With our Sylas rework expect this beefy Mage to be slotted in as a better tank with a more reliable shield and a 2 range Mana-Reave on his doublecast.
Volibear is bearly playable as a trait bot right now, so we’re giving him some big buffs for him to take patch 12.12 by storm.
Talon jumps into the enemy team, hopping from carry to carry like a gymnast who was never told not to run with scissors—except this pair of scissors is the type you get in kindergarten for cutting zig zags. Talon’s Shadow Assault has been bugged, with the ring of blades failing to damage secondary targets, but thanks to the power of Assasin, Talon comps have still been dropping carries like a 90’s kid with a nokia. So alongside the bug fix, we’ve got some preemptive nerfs to make sure the serrated edge of this edgelord doesn’t edge out the rest of the 4-cost carries.
There are lots of Attack Speed carries in Dragonlands (Mirage itself has one in Yone), so we’re changing Daeja into a classic AP carry. She's also still viable as an Attack Speed carry if desired, but will spend more time casting with the lower Mana pool.
As our big, bad, and rad fire breathing dragon, Shyvana just wasn’t hitting the mark—mostly because she wasn’t hitting her Flame Breath spell. Now she'll be more satisfying and consistent to play. And please spam our TFT twitter if you get a 3-star Shyvana to add some boast to the roast of your opponents.
With combat being long, units get more auto attacks off then normal. This makes the Attack Damage from Deathblade have much more value.
Ascending with the Ascension Augment has never been easier in Dragonlands, and while you may think that’s because dragons have wings, it’s actually because combats are longer making this Augment too consistent—but you’re also right, dragons do have wings.
We want Built Different to be a strategy that players embrace for the entire game, figuring out how to navigate their comps to avoid trait activations. Currently we're seeing players use Built Different to win streak before abandoning the Augment entirely in the lategame.So we’re adding stage scaling, to make winstreaking harder early, but make the Augment much more powerful late game.
While it's a balanced Augment, True Twos just isn’t exciting, so we’re trying to make it more enticing and impactful for your early game board.
Finally, we're updating the items granted by Crown and Soul Augments so they feel better to take, especially when you opt for them early in the game.
Small, like our LP pains.
Astral 9 has been on the cosmic struggle bus despite the success of several comps that splash the trait. And now that the Astral Emblem is back, you can use it alongside Astral 6 (or 9) to get a near free 3-star as the Augment allows you to roll that unit in your Astral shops. We aren’t letting the Emblem appear on carousels because of its potential power when used correctly.
Leona couldn’t shield herself from the small durability nerfs that we are shipping as part of accelerating combat pacing.
Thresh is now a rodeo star.
Lulu and Nunu walk into a bar. They are promptly asked to leave because they obviously look underage.
Can’t duck out of these nerfs. Xayah has been overperforming slightly at 2-stars, but at three stars she’s proven to be totally quacked.
The time for giving is soon.
Nomsy has been nomsing a bit too hard.