The first card update of the Legends of Runeterra open beta, the new digital card game from Riot Games, brings tweaks to champions, followers, spells, XP, expeditions rewards, and more.
Here are the full patch notes for LoR Patch 0.9.9.
Champions
Lux (Level one)
- Power: Three → four
- Health: Four → five
Lux’s weaker statline made it a little too difficult to use her as a linchpin, “build-around-me” card, according to Riot. Buffing her stats will help her ability to both stick around as an engine and act as a meaningful threat on her own.
Lux (Level two)
- Power: Four → five
- Health: Five → six
Yasuo (Level two)
- Level up: You Stun or Recall 6+ units → You Stun or Recall 5+ units
While testing Ionia changes internally, Riot found that Yasuo was catching collateral damage from changes aimed at elusive and handbuff decks. Inspiring Mentor was one of the best cards to use while leveling up Yasuo, and together with Deny would provide pivotal protection (extra important when heavily building around Yasuo).
Followers and Spells
Back to Back
- Cost: Five → six
Back to Back can be a huge blowout Burst-speed trick that often leaves opponents without profitable avenues for playing around it. Riot likes this kind of effect, but such a swingy card ultimately warrants a higher cost.
Crimson Curator
- Cost: Two → three
“Battle Scars” decks have been underperforming and the Noxus side of the theme has been a bit one-dimensional. Improving Crimson Curator should increase both options and viability for these decks.
Deny
- Cost: Three → four
Deny is moving from watchlist to changelist after rigorous internal testing and debate. While there are good arguments for Deny to exist at three mana, ultimately it’s proven too prevalent and disruptive to the metagame, heavily restricting viable card options.
Inspiring Mentor
- Health: One → two
- Old text: Play: Grant an ally in hand + 1|1
- New text: Play: Grant an ally in hand + 1|0
Inspiring Mentor was providing too much curve efficiency and resilience to Ionia decks, with the stats granted to the buffed unit often overly protecting them by putting them out of range of similarly-costed removal. Curving Inspiring Mentor into one or even two 4|3 Navori Conspirators was too powerful of a play pattern considering its consistency. With this change, Riot is ensuring an intended weakness of elusive units. Their low health can be more exploitable.
Jewelled Protector
- Power: Three → four
- Health: Three → four
Shifting power from Mentor to Protector (and into later parts of the game) should increase deckbuilding options and give opponents a bit more time to react or set up their own game plans.
Kinkou Lifeblade
- Health: Three → two
One of the intended weaknesses of Elusive decks is that fast decks should be able to effectively race them, since Elusive units are naturally smaller and less cost-efficient. Kinkuo Lifeblade often closed that door on what should be a fundamental weakness of the deck
Commander Ledros
- Cost: Eight → nine
- Power: Eight → nine
- Cost: Eight → nine
A card that does so much should incur a higher opportunity cost and provide opponents more room to win before and after it’s dropped, so Riot is bumping its cost up to nine, which will not only delay Ledros’ arrival but also allow less flexibility when recasting it.
Blade of Ledros
- Cost: Seven → eight
Rhasa, the Sunderer
- Cost: Seven → eight
Scuttlegeist
- Keywords: None → [Fearsome]
Tortured Prodigy
- Power: Three → four
Wraithcaller
- Keywords: [Fearsome] → None
Watchlist
- Fearsome and Control are on the LoR developers’ watchlist as potential problems. No changes were made during the open beta update.
Clarity
- Units with effects that allow opponent reactions now have a “Skills” icon next to “Play” or “Attack” in the card text.
- Hovering on the icon will bring out a tooltip explaining that the Skill allows opponent reactions before resolving.
- Units with effects that do not allow opponent reactions will not have this icon.
- Created cards now have a tooltip that tells both players what created them.
Expeditions Archetypes
Demacian Steel
- Added: Chain Vest
Battle Scars
- Added: Might, Alpha Wildclaw
- Removed: Blood for Blood, Bull Elnuk
Suit up
- Added: Bull Elnuk
- Removed: Alpha Wildclaw
Shroom and Boom
- Added: Assembly Bot, Statikk Shock, Plaza Guardian
- Removed: Academy Prodigy, Chempunk Shredder, Get Excited!
- Shopkeeper trade logic improved.
XP and Expeditions rewards
- End-of-trial XP reduced:
- Zero wins: 100 → 50
- One win: 300 → 150
- Two wins: 500 → 250
- Three wins: 700 → 400
- Four wins: 900 → 600
- Five wins: 1,200 → 800
- Six wins: 1,500 → 1,000
- Seven wins: 2,000 → 1,500
- Reduced XP adjustments for daily PVP wins—players will now receive more XP at high numbers of PVP wins in one day, and will always receive at least 100 XP for constructed PVP wins.
- Base PVP win XP: 200 in Normal / Ranked, 100 in Expeditions (no change)
- One to 10 wins: full XP (no change)
- 11 to 15 wins: -50 XP → full XP
- 16 to 20 wins: -100 XP (no change)
- 21 to 30 wins: -150 XP → -100 XP
- 31+ wins: -200 XP → -100 XP
- Friend Challenge wins now grant 100 XP for the first five wins, and zero XP for 6+.
- Friend Challenges losses/ties now grant 0 XP.
- Friend Challenge matches no longer count towards daily PVP wins/losses or first wins of the day bonuses. They still count for quest progress.
- Six-win Expeditions reward now 1,500 shards (was 1,000), as well as a random champion card and golden chest (unchanged).
- Seven-win Expeditions reward now 3,000 shards (was 3,500), as well as a champion capsule (unchanged).
PC FPS options
- On PC-only, Riot has added an FPS option in the settings menu. The drop-down has three settings:
- 30/60, 60, 60+
Miscellaneous
- Deckbuilder improvements
- Mana curve now indicates number of cards at each cost.
- Bugfix for “MAX” card count text not showing up.
- Deck import & export now copies from/to device clipboard.
- Minor visual polish and readability improvements.
- Board visuals
- Corrected a repeated grass texture on Summoner’s Rift board.
- Cleaned up and reduced intensity of lens flare effect on Demacia board.
- Corrected occasional lighting issues when resolving certain spells on faction boards.
- Players on old client versions will now see a message asking them to restart the client and update, and will be unable to queue until doing so.
- Master tier rankings now more fluid based on how master players are performing against each other (previously released hotfix).
- Claimable rewards on region roads now more strongly highlighted.
- Patch sizes generally decreased.
- Friend Challenge stability improvements.
- Store now marked with a badge when new content is available.
- League of Legends gift cards are now redeemable in LoR.
- In-client messaging for maintenance updated for clarity.
Bug fixes
- Players should no longer get stuck on the loading screen when signing out of League of Legends while signed into LoR.
- Players logging into LoR from different devices should encounter fewer crashes.
- Fixed issues with region quests not progressing as expected.
- Fixed rare issues with players not receiving XP after games.
- MASSIVE nerf to high APMers: Players can no longer discard the same card to multiple Spinning Axes by quickly chaining them (previously released hotfix).
- Anivia’s summoned from deck will now correctly level up if her condition has been met.
- Players should no longer get stuck on “Connecting” if their opponent disconnects while loading.
