5 things to know in League of Legends patch 8.12

League of Legends is in an interesting spot at the moment. Sometimes, we use the word interesting to mean bad.

Let’s start over. League of Legends is in a weird spot at the moment. ADC players have no reason to play their champions, and most players in general feel like Riot isn’t listening to their feedback. Unfortunately, none of that is changing this patch.

On a much brighter note, we’re getting two new items for fighters, each of which off their own playstyle to assist different kinds of players. Banner of Command — that item that everyone hates — has been removed from the game, which is rad. Characters and items that offer shields are also getting some balance changes.

Finally, it’s time for the biggest real-life sporting event of the next four years to start. The World Cup is coming up very soon and our favorite League champs can dress up in their own soccer kits to prepare.

Here are the five biggest things you need to know about patch 8.12. For a full list of changes, check out our post.

1. They aren’t changing ADCs

Usually we try our best to tell you what’s in the patch, but this time we need to talk about what isn’t in there instead. Players have been complaining — for good reason — about the current state of bot lane. If you follow any pros or streamers, your timeline has probably been clogged with takes about how bad the new bot lane meta is.

Well ... bad news. There are no changes to ADCs in this patch outside of Ezreal — who is actually getting nerfed, believe it or not. Every other AD Carry in the game is untouched, which likely means we’ll be seeing another full patch cycle with kill bot lanes.

Sorry fam, maybe next time.

Riot Games

2. Rune changes are here

In better news, some runes are getting changed around in a few places.

Hail of Blades is seeing a bonus to attack speed. You can now have a 75 percent bonus at the start and can scale up to 125 percent.

Presence of Mind is getting a bug fix and Celerity is seeing a significant reduction to its movement speed bonus.

3. Banner of Command removed from the game

Most of the time, when an item gets removed from League of Legends it’s because the item is old and no one uses it. Very rarely is an item removed that people are currently building, but that’s what we have here. The truth is, Banner of Command has never really been a good item. It’s either way too strong, or one of the worst items in the game. Thankfully, this is a fact that Riot is well aware of, so Banner is going away for at least a little while. At some point down the road, maybe the item will come back in a heavily reworked form, but that won’t happen for a while. For now, we’ll just have to live a life without empowered minions.

4 - Shields are getting some pretty big changes

Riot has been threatening to nerf shields for years now, but it never seems to happen. Until now. Finally, Riot has gone through and taken a look at all the shields in League of Legends — or at least the ones you can cast on allies — and taken their power down a bit. For the most part, this is just a reduction on each shield ability’s duration, but Riot did take a look at a few key items for shield supports as well giving nerfs to items like Forbidden Idol, Arden Censer, Mikael’s Crucible and even Redemption. Hopefully this will mean that Janna won’t be able to keep her eternal 50 percent plus win rate for long.

Riot Games

5 - World Cup skins are back

Every four years, the World Cup comes around to brighten our summers with exciting soccer and a little bit of healthy patriotism. Unfortunately for the United States, this World Cup won’t include them. But that’s OK, because Riot is keeping their League of Legends tradition alive for the game’s third World Cup by bringing out a few new skins. Unlike the last few years, which had simpler skins for the event, this time the skins are a little more complicated and have some awesome new animations and effects.