Into the Arcane and into the ranked ladder!

Items will now appear in a toolbar on the left side of your screen, allowing for easier visibility, more refined clicking, and a few usability buffs such as the ability to combine items in your inventory, rearrange items with ease, and allowing Removers and Reforgers to now stack! Be sure to check out the full details of our Item Bench improvements with a blog we released earlier about quality of life improvements for Into the Arcane.

In the spirit of game health and competitive integrity, we're removing Augments from the end-of-game screens and match history. These stats are fun and potentially helpful for players with access to them, but we see a direct correlation between the stat and the pick rate, without regard for the current game state in individual games. This results in often incorrect picks (but the stats told me to!?) and a general staleness in the meta (reduced Augment diversity creates reduced comp diversity). That, plus the fact that these stats aren't available in a number of regions due to local regulations, has led us to make the decision to remove Augments from these sources.

Every game at Stage 4-6 you'll come face to face with the Anomaly, where you choose to roll through the different options offered to pick out the permanent effect you want to inflict upon the unit you send in. Don't worry, they'll probably be fine. Here's a quick TL;DR on the rules, but to get more information about the Anomaly, why it works the way it does, and some examples make sure to check out our article on the mechanic and more.

As mentioned in our quality of life improvements blog, we've moved from Portals to highly curated Opening Encounters. For context, you can check out the most handsome writer's article, but for a full list of Opening Encounters, just keep reading.

We're slightly lowering the Mana units gain from taking damage after mitigation calculations (Armor & MR).

With increased four-star access with the Anomaly, these units have become too attainable to merit their power.

Now that they stack, why not?

Incredibly rare but incredibly powerful Prismatic Orbs now have even more power. Just what that power looks like is an extra Item Reforger or gold, cause money is power.

With Charms no longer taxing a bit of gold in the late game, going to Level 10 is going to be a much more appealing and consistent strategy.

12-component games usually leave you feeling short on items. You want three on your tank and three on your carry, but depending on what you're dropped, you might not be able to achieve that, so players often resort to always taking one item Augment to make sure they have enough.

There's so much content coming with Into the Arcane that we can't possibly cover it with these patch notes. Good thing we have plenty of friends who're more than willing to lend a helping hand.

With a high-stakes trait (Chem-Baron) back in the game, Tiniest Titan is much more valuable.

We're doing a huge swap of our existing Augments and increasing the total Augment pool from 270 to over 300! In that 300 number, over 60% of them will be new, so to make space for those, we gotta say goodbye to a few…alright, maybe more than a few. The following Augments have been removed:

We're also bringing back two (and a +) fan favorites from sets past.

We're using the new set to buff our most unpopular/weak core items (Quicksilver and Gundblade) and ship a few quality-of-life improvements to items that have had a large gap between their power floor and ceiling (Guardbreaker, Giant Slayer), or have suffered from unnecessary randomness (Hand of Justice).For Hextech Gunblade, we're leaning into its identity as a backline item meant for healing allies by moving some of its power from self-healing Omnivamp to ally-healing vibes, cause what says healing vibes more than a sword/gun combo.

As above, so below when aglow.

Making a few pre-emptive adjustments to ensure none of our Artifacts are left on the dusty shelves of the Magitorium or are too powerful for even the most proficient wielders of Hextech.