It's just a few days before the official start of Season 11 and Riot Games developer, Mark Yetter, has released the first patch preview of the year, featuring buffs to underperformers and nerfs to the previous patch's leaders. They're adjusting both champions and items, including yet another change to Yasuo and Yone's passives to help them find a better home with all the new crit changes of Season 11. 

To start, the Riot devs made a number of item changes, especially to the plethora of burst related items that hit the game this pre-season. Coming into Season 11, Riot added a mythic item type, which gives passive bonuses to other completed items. Many of those mythics have strong actives and passives, adding to the overall burst in the game, like Night Harvester, which does a large amount of damage on your first champion hit every so often. They're shifting some of those burst damages into stats in the items themselves but haven't clarified the exact changes yet. 

They also adjusted two other items, Runaan's Hurricane and Muramana, both of which had interesting pre-seasons. Runaan's was a very popular item, despite being expensive for a Zeal item and offering very similar stats to others that were around 1000 gold cheaper. However, players valued the AD it offered along with the bolts, and the devs changed it to better match other Zeal items similar to past seasons. Muramana was also a controversial item, being the better choice for mages than Seraph's Embrace despite the lack of AP because of the item's passive and Ability Haste. This marks yet another major change to the item to help it be better for AD champs and less good for mages.

Other items got buffed, like the Grevious Wounds items, and some supportive/utility items including Shurelia's Battlesong, Archangel's Staff/Seraph's Embrace, and the Ionian Boots of Lucidity. This change to the mage tear item along with the other change to Muramana should send mages back to their intended item. And the lucidity boots should be picked up much more often considering their wealth of Ability Haste for cheap. 

For champions, a lot of strong performing junglers got some love taps, as well as a few other leaders in the current meta. Those receiving buffs, however, are some of the higher skill cap solo laners and a few of the lower performing AD carries. 

With these changes comes the official launch into the new season, ending the two months of item testing and rapid changes, settling into a more balanced environment for the next 10 months till pre-season lands upon us again.

What do you think about the first patch, and what do you hope to see in upcoming patches?

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