Rito has just released information on the midseason mage update and AP item pass, more info in the link below.

http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/featured/mid-season-magic

Quick Summary:

Riot is fleshing out mages to be more unique. Champions being updated include:

• Malz - W now included within ult, can spawn voidlings freely, situational damage and CC immunity passive (acts like a better banshees)
• Brand - Explosions and more aoe on all spells. Don't group against him now.
• Vel'koz - True damage on ult, q no longer shows split marker
• Annie - Tibbers bonks stunned targets
• Syndra - Can hold more balls, picks them up from the street randomly.
• Vlad - New E, blood explosions.
• Zyra - New passive, spawns seeds around her, Q is improved.
• Fiddle - New passive, gains movements speed after standing still.
• Cass - Can't buy boots, MS per level, W has 'Grounded' effect which stops movement abilities.
• Ziggs - W executes towers below 25% HP
• Veigar - Gains AP for hitting enemy champs with abilities (as well as unit kills)
• Xerath - Ult reloads upon successfully hitting a target. Scripts pls.
• Anivia - Ult grows in size and damage with time.

AP items have also been updated:

• New hextech items with cool utility passives
• Chalice, Catalyst and Tear all revamped, same for their fully upgraded forms.
• Rip WotA

Also elemental dragons hype.

Tl;dr

Discuss.

 

Watching a League Stream where they talk with some of the designers in game as they play their champs. Tibbers also "Vengefully Mauls" anyone that kills Annie.

 

Malz has me by far the most excited... because I want to build AD. Screw these new fangled Hextech contraptions, I want to build a Death's Dance and have 7 Voidlings heal me, dammit!

Yes, Death's Dance does in fact heal you from Voidling damage. Red Pot too.

In all seriousness, AD Malz has never been stronger. For one, Malz can clear jungle without taking damage or losing much mana, and he wrecks camps. 7 Voidlings every camp turns the jungle into a joke. The fact that you no longer need to spam spells means you also don't have to build Tear, which was always sub par on Malz and only grabbed for the mana.

He can also solo all Dragon types. And Rift Scuttle. On his first full clear.

There may be some nerfs headed his way.

If they don't completely gut him pre release, which is a big if (looking at you, Taric, goodnight my sweet prince) then I can picture Death's Dance into tank stats being an actually viable build on him.

 

There's a ton of massive changes in the mid season that I'm not exactly excited for.

While I'm glad she's no longer relegated to support, Zyra's Q looks like it will feel a lot worse than live and Malz passive looks broken as shit.
Moreover, Quicksilver Sash only cleanses cc effects now, not things like Zed ult. The dragon changes look cool but Mordekaiser might come back to be more obnoxious.

 

Don't forget that Cass's E now has lower base CD, instead of a CD-reset, and the damage is either terrible or great depending on if the target is poisoned. Also, it has built in healing(as with the current passive).

Zerg, where did you get the info on the Quicksilver change, and does it apply to Mercurial as well? A quick search didn't yield any recent news.

 

It's on Surrender@20. Search Quicksilver. Yes, it applies to Mercurial.

 

Fuck Malz, Brand is horrifically broken. The range on his passive burn explosion is goddamn gigantic, and you only have to hit 3 spells - something that's guaranteed if you land stun and have mana, and is easy as pie when you include ult.

I like the noodle's new interaction with research and it doing damage. Makes sense to me and has decent counterplay. If you don't want to get melted by a laser beam, don't let the hentai monster probe you.

Cass's new area control spell is cool. Passive was kind of meh until I realized she gets to build ARAM mode no boots. I'm seeing a lot of Luden's Echo and Lichbane in her future.

 

Brand in ARAM's gonna be pretty brutal. There's basically no choice but clustering there, especially in a fight.

Malzahar will provide a huge stream of sustained harassment too because of added pressure from voidlings.

And what'd they do to Cass's ratios anyways?

 

They also gave Swain a change to his Q that I personally like a lot. Clearing later in the game is so much easier since your Beatrice isn't limited to killing one minion.

I think they buffed the frequency the ravens in your ult attack, too.

 

They took away the poison stacks passive and made her gain scaling movespeed per level. The literal name of the ability is 'Snakes Don't Need Boots'.

Opens up an item slot she can use for another AP item, so a pretty decent get.

 

The actual name is, I believe, "Serpentine Grace".

 

Just checked the PBE and you're right.

The real question now is what does Corki get?

 

Sorry Jon D:

Still not used to these forums, I'll try to remember next time.

The mercurial changes really worry me tbh. There had better be some major zed and trundle nerfs to compensate, otherwise I can see them stomping all over everyone once the patch is released.

Playing ADC for the forseeable future is not going to be fun.

 

Your last sentence is something that came to mind for me as well.

 

Whelp, looks like Riot decided to kill Jungle Malz rather than balance it.

I'm not really surprised they did this, despite saying they want Jungle Malz to be an option. It also punishes AD Malz way harder than AP Malz, which is amusing.

edit:

Apparently they decided to keep the Voidlings spawning on Epic Monsters, so they gutted his his clear but left the abuse cases. wat

 

Do Voidlings scale with AP now?

AD Malz was great in URF. Been playing him a lot too recently in ranked.

Not entirely sure how all these changes are going to affect the game, but Mordekaiser is probably broken.

 

Yeah, they have a 0.05 AP ratio. About 1/3rd the scaling of AD, but they're definitely a fair portion of your damage now.

 

http://www.surrenderat20.net/p/current-pbe-balance-changes.html#balance6 has a bunch of the new numbers, and tweaks on the original proposed changes.

Brand, for example, is a lot less scary than I initially suspected he would be with the new passive, due to getting rather noteworthy nerfs on pretty much everything else. That, and his passive doing quite a bit less than current(2% over 4 seconds per stack, rather than 8% over 4 seconds as now), unless you can get the explosion(16%+AP scaling, by level 9) to go off.

In general, it looks like most of the mages took fairly impacting hits to their damage on other abilities to trade off for their new gains from the update.

 

Getting the explosion off isn't hard. It's going to turn good Brands who can hit their stun combo into outright fuckasauruses.