Update: The full Patch 25.23 notes are live.
Check out the full patch 25.23 here
The Preview Patch notes for 25.23 are here. From Riot Phroxzon via X (Source)
Zaahen
-Zaahen is starting out development as a support.
-We hadn’t made a support for a while and we already had a headstart on wanting Zaahen to be a Darkin with eye/all-seeing motifs.
-The first iconic ult Squad5 tried was swinging his Glaive to Deathmark everybody (think Deathmark meets Xin Ult)
-One of the issues with this was that Zaahen had a support economy, so he’d do this and just die. It wasn’t a fatal flaw, but it wasn’t quite cool enough to build a kit around.
-Another idea tried was to embody the idea of sacrifice; Zaahen would gain stats each time he got a takedown or died (because supports die a lot)
-Teammates weren’t super enthusiastic about this though, even if it ended up being powerful and useful
-At this point, we decided that Top lane might be a better fit, especially because some of the Xin Zhao parallels weren’t quite working out from the support role
Zaahen in Top Lane
-We were taking a bunch of inspiration from Erlang Shen and Guan Yu throughout development.
-Erlang Shen has a third eye, which is often known for being all-seeing and associated with enlightment/higher levels of consciousness in Hinduism or Buddhism and some other Eastern religions.
-So some of the ideas were related to these motifs.
-Squad5 tried some ideas like Ult makes him untargetable to non-targeted abilities (think Gwen W), but this only lasted a test (was very experimental)
-Also tried versions where he learned about his opponents while fighting them.
-Another version that was interesting was dodging attacks every X seconds (but that became kinda hard to use and was already similar to old Pantheon’s passive)
-Kind of late in development however, we had a pretty functional kit that was working well and was satisfying, but it still felt it was missing something, and August suggested adding the revive back as max stacks on the passive. That just immediately clicked in Playtest and so we kept it.
Rek’sai
-Rek’sai was erroneously listed as a buff yesterday, sorry about that.
-For those watching Worlds, or playing high ELO solo Q, Rek’sai has been pretty pretty powerful in Top Lane, but we’re OK with her Jungle strength currently.
-In particular, she is sustaining too much, so we’re taking those aspects down.
Skarner
-Skarner has been pretty heavily overnerfed, so we’re restoring a bunch of power to him this patch.
Mel
-Thanks to Faker for raising visibility on Mel, we’re making some relatively power neutral adjustments that move power out of some of her high frustration and lower counterplay builds (eg. E max) into other places with higher counterplay and interactivity (eg. Passive)
-The E max build in particular is pretty fire and forget and is looking quite a bit stronger than Q max in many situations
-This is relatively unintuitive to players and lower gameplay, so we’re making adjustments to it
Mundo
-Recently, the team found a quite impactful bug where Mundo was getting max damage at 30% missing health instead of 70% missing health.
-While it didn’t result in a change in his winrates overall (he was still balanced around this), it did change his overall power budget, so the damage is being adjusted back up to compensate.
-Despite his recent rise to fame in several series’, we still think he’s overall pretty balanced, but just has pretty sharp success/failure cases which seems OK for now (might re-consider later).
Vlad
-As one of the beneficiaries of the sustain nerfs in previous patches, Vlad has benefited quite a bit, so we’re tapping him down a bit and making him more vulnerable in top lane especially.
ADC Meta
-ADC meta has been stale for a while, so we’re looking for a bit of a shake up here. Most of the changes here are pretty self-explanatory
Alternate Junglers
-This patch, we’re looking at a lot of novelty oriented changes around adding new champs into the jungle (and some old ones)
-Many regions suffer from high jungle autofill rates and being able to play your mains when you’re autofilled we think is overall net positive.
-Some of these changes are more experimental (we’re trying Fizz in the jungle for example), but will be monitoring closely to see how they shake out.