With the new year comes a new League of Legends season; as of January 9th, 2024, season 14 of League of Legends has hit live servers and changed the game we know and love in a lot of ways. Most of these changes to the game are quite controversial, and we will go over all of them here, but first it is important to point out a key difference between the start of this season and other seasons in the past.

Normally, the previous year’s season ends in mid-November of that previous year and players can play on the coming year’s seasonal changes for the better part of two months before the new year’s season. This pause between seasons was known as the pre-season and it was a great way for players to test, learn, and understand the new season’s changes before the actual start of the new season. However, there was no pre-season before the beginning of season 14. Instead, season 13 lasted until January 8th and on January 9th, players were thrown into season 14 (unless they played the PBE, which only about 10% of the player base ever does). Therefore, most players are still learning and figuring out what is good with all the changes that came with season 14.

That being said, let’s talk about the major changes of season 14. The biggest change was made to the map, Summoner’s Rift – it is the biggest change the map has ever received out of in its 14+ year history. Overall, the map is more dynamic and changes throughout the game, especially around baron and dragon pit. Walls, bushes, and the river where all changed to be more equitable for laners on either side of the rift. Player sentiment about the map is controversial, most laners like the changes while junglers are not very happy. It does seem like these changes will be good in the long run, but as players are still figuring them out.

The jungle also received a few changes outside of the terrain changes mentioned above. There is a new early game neutral objective called “Void Grubs” which spawns in the Rift Herald/Baron pit starting at 5 minutes and lasting until 14 minutes into any given game. The grubs just add a little additional damage to enemy turrets based on how many grubs a team takes (up to three). Also, scuttle crab and red/blue buffs can become void corrupted giving a team additional buffs. Void corrupted scuttle crabs give additional vision and red/blue gives their buffs to all alive players. These changes essentially make these jungle objectives into late game team objectives that can have pretty significant impacts on the game.

The final big changes that came with season 14 are item changes and additions. This type of change is standard for a new season, but the number of changes and additions that came with season 14 is much larger than normal. A few dozen new items and/or item components were added, from attack damage, lethality, and attack speed to ability power, support, and tank items, basically every role has a few new items they can build into and test out. Also, some existing items got changed to do different things or have different effects. Most notably are mythic items, which are now removed from the game, so this means they no longer have their special mythic item effect but can also be with other items the used to be mythic items because there is no longer a unique purchase restriction (except for a few items). If you are interested in learning about these new items or anything else mentioned above, I would recommend checking out the season 14 patch notes or better yet, jumping into a few games and testing them out yourself. See you on Summoner’s Rift!