It’s time to take on the Mountain to save your Little Legend friends by strengthening your team, strategizing around your powerful Guide, and utilizing rewards from your Journey Track. Ao Shin’s Ascent goes live on September 24th at 10 AM Pacific Time, shortly after the release of this patch! It’ll stick around until patch 15.7 on October 21st. Here’s what you can do to prepare:

Crystal Gambit has yet to crystallize into the meta when played as a high-risk loss-streak trait. We’re making higher cashouts easier to reach and more worth the HP sacrifice, while balancing out the rewards and power. Because the (3) piece brings more power to transition into Crystal Gambit (5) and then (7), we’re lowering the power of Crystal Gambit (7) which is already in a strong spot.

Trading a bit of the rocket-powered Crew trait damage for some bomb-fused selfish Ziggs carry power to make sure Ziggs can be a viable and destructive 3-cost carry.

We’ll miss being able to grow alongside Lulu’s Monsters, but having them ready for battle the moment you click on them makes these cuties a lot easier to flex into your comp, whether as a late-game carry or a mid-game carry item holder. To train them is no longer our cause, but to be the very best, well, we’ll just have to see.

Kennen is our worst performing tank. Buffs to his heal should allow him to reign supreme, or at least become a valuable supportive tank for Sorcerer comps, while a small nerf to his damage keeps him within the power budget of a 1-cost.

With Stretchy Arms out of the picture (See Removed Power Ups) we’re able to give Gangplank a rather large buff without fear of his stretchy pirate ways taking over for far too many episodes of K.O. Coliseum. As a reminder, a base Attack Speed buff here may look small, but it will have him casting far more often and scaling even better with his Duelist trait or any sources of Attack Speed you throw his way.

Katarina’s been out of the picture in Battle Academia comps, allowing class presidents Caitlyn and Jayce to shine. But with them in line, it’s time for Kat to cut back into the meta—just maybe not as deep as last time.

We’ve been trying to get Ahri into a good spot to be played as a reroll carry, but she’s often been overshadowed by her traits and other carries in them. We’re focusing on selfish damage buffs here to make sure she can take down units even when she’s not benefiting from the extra damage she gets when they’re low health. As a reminder, this buff will be even bigger when she does take advantage of that up to 50% bonus for hitting a low health target. As for her overkill damage pop, we’re letting even more of that excess damage spill over so that she wastes less damage when she does overkill a target, making her more consistent as a three item reroll carry.

As mentioned in the traits section, we’re doing away with the leveling component of Lulu’s Monsters. This will make them easier to flex into at any stage of the game, as their base form will be much stronger. That being said, these lil guys are now intended to be balanced at a 3-cost power level, but since they’re so flexible, expect them to be a bit weaker than carries with optimized traits and the same star-level and item usage.

Our only champion nerf for the patch is Viego, whose 15.4 rise came more as a result of optimized builds/Power Ups, nerfs to the power ceiling, and our champion role adjustment which left him with far more beneficial Attack Speed stats.

Finally, Ziggs. We’ve been buffing Ziggs a few times this set in the hopes of letting him have his day as a successful carry. Due to the nature of his econ-linked trait, the Crew, he’ll always lag a bit behind other 3-costs. Still, by moving some of the trait’s power into him, we hope players will feel better about itemizing him and picking up a few mid-game teamfights before they can slot in some late-game super carries.

Akali can be a source of frustration when she’s able to be the primary carry in assassin/stall comps. We want her to find success in assassinating weaker one-star, offensively itemized backline carries, but she shouldn’t be the single source of power for a team without complete trait and item/Augment (read Radiant Items) dedication. After some deliberate testing we believe we’ve found a healthier niche for her to dash into that should punish fragile backliners with lazy positioning. While she should be able to kill a carry, she isn’t going to be frequently chain casting and becoming invulnerable nonstop as she once did in the past as her 15.2 Mana and Attack Speed nerfs have taken care of that. Of course a Dawncore could change this…

With her ability’s Attack Speed scaling, Ashe was far too dependent on perfect itemization and Duelist 6. We’re adjusting her ability to deal more damage, making less optimal itemization less of a dealbreaker and allowing more players to flex into her later on in the game.

With her claws trimmed, Yuumi’s been feline kinda ruff—which is quite an issue cause cats don’t ruff, they purr. Regardless, we’ve got a small rework for Yuumi’s ability to have her ripping through more pages early in fights, while ramping a bit slower. Overall, our number adjustments to her will make her much stronger than in 15.4, while also being less reliant on a powerful stall comp to ramp up. By making her less narrow and dependent on specific builds and comps we hope to open up Yuumi as an AP flex carry.

As a big boom caster, it’s Seraphine’s job to wipe a significant portion of the board, but the only thing she’s been wiping are the tears that well up when I bot four listening to sad-girl pop music. With this buff, we want to see a two-star itemized Seraphine succeed in booming a board with the correct setup. She should find success on some creative stat-heavy boards such as 6 Heavyweight Seraphine or 6 Bastion.

After a few patches of data there are just some Augments that are never clicked, so we’re doing away with them to make sure the three you see are as appealing as can be. As a note, Tiniest Titan+ still exists as the Stage 3-2 linked Augment, when the HP is more consistently helping, and if it’s not, I guess you’re just going to win anyways, so congrats on that. Proud of you.

We're still experiencing bugs with I'll Be The Head/Arms/Legs, which has been frustrating for players pursuing Prismatic Mighty Mech. We're continuing to work towards resolving these issues for a future patch and delivering a working Prismatic Mighty Mech breakpoint, but for now, we're disabling these Augments.

You don’t have to fit into a perfect cookie-cutter shape to find success and joy. And we hope Zac takes that to his blobby heart (do blobs have hearts?) as we nerf his Perfect Form Champion Augment which has become even more powerful as we’ve buffed his go-to comp in other ways.

Speaking of overperforming Champion Augments, Mundo may need to pull up a chair for us to break the news to him. The increase in range buff we gave him last patch ended up being rather effective, so we’re taking away some of the extra damage the Champion Augment provides. But don’t worry, the doctor can be found in other comps too as we’ve re-enabled Grand Slam after fixing a bug with it.

Making Quicksilver quicker.

We’re continuing to realign Artifacts between Radiants and Completed items in terms of power and are buffing many of the ones that have failed to hit that mark.

We’ve opted to disable Suspicious Trenchcoat. The Artifact was only strong in niche situations that highlighted the strength of other items, and not the champion wielding them. We want Artifacts to be champion focused, by emphasizing their fantasy as a terrifying damage-over-time monster like Malzahar with Blighting Jewel, or as an AP threat that likes to dive deep like Katarina with her go-to, Zhonya’s Paradox. Unfortunately, Trenchcoat wasn’t meeting this goal, and instead was oftentimes a trap for players who weren’t able to optimize the right powerful items alongside it.

We’re removing some Power Ups that we’ve had to balance champions around entirely so that we can focus on keeping the champions viable in many ways rather than one rigid build path. An example of this for this patch is us removing Fusion Dance so we wouldn’t have to nerf Darius because his Fusion Dance combo was overpowered while his base form is fine.

Past that we’re also removing boring/unexciting Power Ups (Cyclone Rush) and some that overlapped too much with others (tank healing Power Ups). With these gone we can have more room for interesting and dynamic ones to take the stage.

This is the big one. We’re cutting out Power Up options that almost never made sense to pick. You’ll still see some choices that are stronger than others depending on the champion and situation, but with this update our goal is to eliminate the completely dead options that never felt worth taking.