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The Worlds 2017 qualifiers may be several weeks away, but the patch they will be played on is live now. In a post from early July, Riot’s Lead Gameplay Designer Andrei “Meddler” Van Roon announced that the Worlds qualifying patch would be none other than patch 7.15, which hit servers today.
This will mean that once professional teams start playing competitive regular season matches on the patch, which should start next week, it will be their first opportunity to start adapting to the multitude of changes that Riot has made over the last two patches.
With most of the qualifiers not starting until early to mid August, this should give teams plenty of time to adjust to the patch in question.
However, it’s not clear how difficult this will make it for teams to adapt to the actual 2017 World Championship patch, which is going to be 7.18. With such a large difference between the patch the qualifiers and the event itself will be played on, with no competitive games in-between, the likelihood of teams struggling to adequately prepare and being caught off-guard in the first few weeks of the tournament are highly likely.