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Extensive terrain changes have made their way to Summoner’s Rift in League of Legends season 14 with patch 14.1. The season opens up with massive updates to the jungle, new void monsters being introduced as neutral objectives, a revamped Rift Herald, and three types of Baron Nashors and their respective pits.
Terrain changes are hitting almost every part of the map, and one of the major goals behind the Rift updates is to protect solo lakers from junglers and other roaming champions.
Riot Games felt that ganking during the early stages of the game was a bit more powerful, allowing teams that get ahead an easier time to snowball. Hence, the new changes will require a fair bit of creativity and investment from junglers to get early kills and assists.
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Below are all the terrain changes that have made their way to League of Legends season 14 with patch 14.1.
League of Legends season 14 patch 14.1 terrain changes
1) Top side terrain changes
Top lane often remains an isolated island from the rest of the map, at least till the mid-game mark. The role is barely ever influenced by other champions on the map, and the state of top lane in most cases is dictated by the junglers.
With the new changes, Riot Games will be looking to:
- Substantially reduce the ability for other lanes to affect the top in the early game, letting the 1v1 fight really shine. But it’s not like the jungler won’t be able to gank at all.
- The developers have also shifted the top brush into a pixel in the center of the river so it’s less side-skewed and substantially more powerful when contested.
- It tends to be correct to ward outside of the river brush on live in many cases, and while this still remains true to an extent, this brush is closer to an optimal warding position and is less potent for ganking than before.
- Also, an extension of the jungler influence on the top lane was the early Rift Herald. More often than not, Rift Herald was dropped in the top lane. So a fair bit of it will be curbed with that.
When talking about the top lane terrain changes, Riot stated,
“We’ve seen that quite often both top laners are dissatisfied with lanes breaking apart this early—the behind player being put into the dumpster, and the ahead player not having any more time to play with their lead. By pushing back Rift Herald, we’re intending to substantially reduce the volatility of the late laning phase top lane experience. Dovetailing off the objective space, one of our goals with the new Voidgrubs objective is that top laners will have a lot more agency in affecting the outcome of the early top side objective than before.”
They continued
“We’re also making the top side objective more potent for team-wide success than previously so that their early leads can matter more for the team. We’ll go more into the Voidgrubs down below, but overall we’re aiming to give top laners a lane more protected from outside influence while making their lane more important for the team’s overall chances of victory.”
2) Mid lane terrain changes
Mid lane gets ganked the most often. The role is the most unsafe for certain champions who do not have much mobility early on, hence, the new changes wlll look to make mid lane substantially safer for most champions.
Additionally, the changes will also look to push assassins out of the lane, making the lane more hospitable for immobile mages.
The roam paths will be significantly safer:
- Each side will have a path players can roam along that requires putting themselves at substantially less risk to get to the river or even the respective lane they’re roaming to.
- Riot has also pushed out the mid lane brush in League of Legends season 14 for the same reasons. Providing mid laners with about 20% more time after seeing an enemy before they can get into actionable range should give substantially less power to early ganks and much more safety to these immobile characters.
- Mid lane, at its core, is a lane that requires some amount of roaming to support junglers or side lanes. In the current state of League, the mid laners who don’t have the agency to safely roam feel invalidated by the role.
When talking about the mid lane terrain changes for League of Legends season 14 Riot states,
“Altogether our goal here is to lower the requirements to a functional mid laner across champions so that we can support a wider roster of champions there, particularly immobile mages and their like. We are definitely not trying to push champions out of the role though and will definitely be balancing to follow up here, especially since there are surely a number of high-agency mages who will benefit a lot and be overbearing at the start.”
3) Bot lane terrain changes
Compared to mid and top, bot lane is receiving significantly fewer changes to its terrain.
- These changes open up a new gank pathway through the bottom red jungle and are among our riskiest changes to the map.
- Riot is reducing gank potency elsewhere while nominally increasing it in bot lane.
- Red side bot lane is now particularly more vulnerable than before (as opposed to blue side) because it doesn’t have the extra distance created from Dragon pit walls to give more time for responding to action on vision or even just to slightly delay movement from the river.
- This new gank pathway also doesn’t allow for as easy contesting of vision in its tri brush because of the relatively easier access from the river.
- The center of the river brush should also be more of a focal point to contest, as it has deeper river control than the old brush and is less side-skewed. This brush should be substantially worse for ganking red-side bot lane when unwarded, however.
- The river brush gives near unfettered access to lane, and this power is brought down to mitigate the concerns around gankability of the red-side bot lane. Notably, this brush does cover access to the red tri brush from the river to protect your bot lane from all but the deepest wraparound ganks.
4) Jungle terrain changes
The geometry in the jungle is tweaked to support the other lane adjustments and add a lot of new interest to Dragon and Baron fights. Access to these epic monster fights on live is relatively easy through a major choke point opposite the monster, or minor chokepoints deeper into the river or the jungle further out.
- The latest adjustments aim to shift away from a single choke point and focus combat around multiple entries, as well as generally overhaul how these fights play out as this space is quite solved, and players are very used to this macro.
- Contesting should be a little bit more equal across sides as it currently tends to advantage the team who can comfortably engage and escape from an objective.
- These adjustments also do help roaming quite a bit, as there’s a safe secondary path for both teams that doesn’t involve any jungle movement.
5) Infernal terrain changes
Riot is also adjusting some Drakes so that they’ll play nicely with all of the new walls (or lack thereof). This includes moving a few small walls and brushes for Mountain and Ocean Drake.
- NEW: Infernal Cinders spawn randomly on the map in small groups, with a higher likelihood of spawning towards the losing team. Picking up a naturally spawned Infernal Cinder grants a small burst of movement speed and grants an Infernal Cinder stack.
- NEW: Infernal Cinder stacks grant 0.3 Ability Haste per stack. On death, up to 5 Cinders can be maintained, with some of the remainder being dropped on the ground and the rest being destroyed. Cinders dropped from player deaths do not grant the burst of movement speed upon pickup.
- REMOVED: Infernal Rift will no longer destroy any walls on the Rift.
With League of Legends season 14 terrain changes Riot’s goal is to create more interesting map states that change with every game.
