LoL Patch 25.S1.4 Preview: Mel nerfs, Item nerfs and more Ruinous Atakhan in pro play

Releasing on Thursday, February 20, this patch buffs IE crit carries, adjusts Atakhan spawn rates, nerfs Mel Medarda, buffs Ashe, tones down Kalista, and nerfs Warwick top.

Mel Medarda's skin

Mel Medarda is nerfed by reducing her range and increasing her vulnerability windows

The League of Legends 25.S1.4 Patch Notes is out. According to the official schedule the game's developers provided, Patch 25 S1.4 is set to be released on Thursday, February 20, 2025. This patch nerfs many different items, notably Infinity Edge, and is supposed to increase the appearance of Ruinous Atakhan in pro play. However, most importantly, it brings significant nerfs to Mel Medarda, who was released two patches ago.

The Full Patch 25 S1.4 Preview. Credit: @RiotPhroxzon on X.

Buffs:

Champions: Ashe, Ekko, Gangplank, Jayce, Nautilus, Sion, Teemo, Yasuo
Items: Merc Treads, Symbolic Soles

Nerfs:

Champions: Hwei, Kalista, Kog'Maw, Lulu, Twitch, Warwick
Items: Abyssal Mask, Fimbulwinter, Heartsteel, Plated Steelcaps, Unending Despair

Adjustments:

Champions: Mel, Diana, Elise
Items: Infinity Edge

Swiftplay :

Champion: Yorick
Systems: Death Timers

Riot's Reasoning behind these changes

Read more about League of Legends changes on the X account of Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison.

Item Changes

As mentioned yesterday, we're trying to make ADC's feel better through the IE changes and hit some of the outliers on Tank items
Primary IE crit carry builders, especially in higher levels of play have not been particularly strong in the meta compared to say Kalista, Varus, Ezreal, Corki
This IE change is intended to be a light buff to those archetypes (who are typically more popular in solo q) without sending them overboard in optimized/high skill play in particular
Tank items are feeling like they have a pretty good systemic foundation baseline to build on currently, so hopefully we can leave them here for a while

Atakhan

This patch we're making some changes to impact the rate at which Voracious and Ruinous Atakhan spawn in games
Our intention is to do some tuning changes that make Ruinous Atakhan more likely to show up in Pro games without changing the rate that he shows up in regular games much (which is about ~15% of the time in slow games)
We hope to get this balance in a good spot by the time First Stand comes around

Mel

Mel's winrate this patch is being tanked by her W being erroneously suggested to be maxed 2nd (which we're fixing for this patch)
She's getting a significant influx of new players, which is tanking her winrate somewhat, but she's still very popular which is great
Changes this patch are targeting at opening up moments of vulnerability, through early E duration, lowering her effective range and W duration
This should require her to get in range more, stay in range to build up R stacks and be more vulnerable when doing so
We're intending her to be weak into beefy frontlines that she has to stack up and a bit more friendly/enemy comp dependent (setup for E, needs a good reflect to scale well)
In solo Q she's intended to be a lot more effective and she is intended to start to fall off around 3 items-ish, but have pretty comfortable ramp up until then (this may need to change at some point in the future though)

Ashe

Ashe took a pretty significant hit from the changes on 15.1, so we're looking to pull that back a bit

Kalista

Has been extremely high presence, even in fearless world, so we're pulling the changes back there a bit

Warwick

Warwick top has emerged as a pretty strong pick over a pretty extended period of time, so we're looking to take him down a tad there with a top skewed nerf

Header Photo Credit: Riot Games