LoL patch 14.10 brings major changes to kill rewards and runes

League of Legends patch 14.10 is here, and with it comes major changes to prep the game for 2024’s next ranked split. 

This patch sees massive changes to several areas of the game, most notably to ADCs. The changes are meant to shake things up and give the bottom lane a fighting chance earlier in the game, as it has struggled in the past several seasons. These changes could be Riot’s response to the lane swap meta that took over MSI 2024.

Riot has also tuned gold and experience to help solve this problem as well. The developer has also tampered with several punes, even removing some altogether. 

ADC items and their shifting role

A major focus in the patch notes for 14.10 was revamping ADC items to have a clearer place or fit better into certain builds. Previously, many of the marksmen items in particular had a lot of different stats on them. However, this led to the items not standing out or performing as well by themselves, leading to ADCs being fairly weak early on.

Now, most of the items have a clear reason to build them. If you’re looking to build your Champion for critical strike chance, players will have fewer options to pick from. However, the ones they do pick will be stronger. 

They removed the energized system from items that aren’t legendary, leading to the complete removal of items like Kircheis Shard and Stormrazor from the game. This also caused several build paths to shift around for problematic items.

Overall, the ADC item changes are going to shift the way bottom laners scale in power, especially early on. It should also streamline building paths and make it easier to decide what to build, especially for players who may not know the most optimized items to build in every situation. 

Patch 14.10 gold and XP changes explained

The way that gold and experience previously worked before Patch 14.10 left bottom laners and junglers slightly behind middle and top laners. While this wasn’t a problem in the laning phase, roaming solo laners caused several issues.

Riot increased early monster experience and duo lane experience, as well as shared champion kill experience, to address this issue. The developer also nerfed later experience and kills to prevent bottom laners and junglers from dominating in the late game. The idea is that most late-game kills come from ADCs and junglers, so this mostly impacts them and stops them from snowballing too much.

Taking away late game experience wasn’t enough to balance out the early game experience being added, so gold from late game champion kills is also being nerfed. 

Say sayonara to some runes and hello to new ones

Certain runes have consistently been hard to balance, so many of Patch 14.10’s major changes target them. For example, Hail of Blades now gives different attack speed to ranged Champions compared to melee champions.

This has also caused several runes to be removed if they were too problematic, such as Predator. In their place, a few new runes are arriving that will target specific challenge areas in each rune tree.