League of Legends 25.S1.3 early patch notes: Attack speed cap increase, Dragon Soul changes & more

James Lynch
lol Hextech Chests

League of Legends made a crazy start to 2025, with the introduction of Feats of Strength, Atakhan, and other gameplay elements upending the meta. Things have calmed down somewhat since then thanks to attentive patches from Riot, and another set of changes are now on the way.

Patch 25.S1.3 should be ready to go live on February 4, with complete confirmation on exactly what that entails arriving the day before. Until then, Lead Gameplay Designer Matt Leung-Harrison has broken down what players can expect in broad strokes when it does go live.

The headline change is an increase to the Attack Speed cap from 2.5 to 3.0. This is to allow more room to experiment with Attack Speed champs without running into random caps that limit the gameplay experience for players.

Outside of that, there are the usual raft of buffs and nerfs, alongside some interesting alterations to Dragon Souls.

League of Legends 25.S1.3 early patch notes

Skarner Base Skin Splash Art

The breakdown of major changes detailed by Leung-Harrison, in his own words, is as follows:

Mel

After the hotfix, Mel has mostly stalled her win rate growth (similar to Neeko’s release; another champ that has similar “play against” learning curve) – We think her abilities are intuitive and will be learnt over time (drop the stacks, play around her W).

We don’t feel the need to make further balance adjustments this patch and feel like she’s in a good spot while we observe how players learn her – She’s currently extremely popular, which is great and we wanted to make her easy to play because of the influx of new/reviving players who wanted to play her from Arcane (hence the last hitting assistance, easy to use spells, etc.)

Support Items

We’re trying to strike the right balance of appropriate support power level (and how that impacts ADC satisfaction) and not tanking the satisfaction of the role – These nerfs are targeted at particularly the more damaging support items to decrease damage in the game. It’s not any higher than Season 14, but doesn’t mean it can’t go down a bit – We’re still interested in longer-term solves to increase ADC and Top agency and satisfaction in particular, but these changes will take a longer time to get right and land.

Bounties

We’re further reducing the value of bounties when a single player is trying to claw the game back while carrying on the losing team.

Attack Speed Cap

A small increase to the Attack Speed cap to 3.0; we don’t want to increase this too high as it makes piloting champions at high attack speed too challenging – However, we need to balance this against the fantasy of systems (typically items) paying themselves off fully with high attack speed values that don’t (seemingly randomly) get capped.

Dragon Souls

A small rebalancing to the Dragon Souls. Cloud despite being perceived the weakest by the majority players is known as the most powerful by skilled players. Chemtech on the other hand is just underpowered across the board.

Domination Tree

In 25.S1.1, we removed a decent amount of Adaptive from the Domination tree through Eyeball collector. We’re compensating for this somewhat, but not all the way, by buffing all of the Domination Keystones. We think it’s still valuable that these assassin-style champions (in particular) can take other keystones, so in these cases (like Blue Kayn, Evelynn), we will also buff the champions to compensate for their total power level.

In addition to all of that, Leung-Harrison confirmed which champions can expect buffs and nerfs, without going as far as saying exactly what those are going to be.

Champion Buffs

  • Evelynn
  • Jax
  • Kayn (Blue)
  • Nasus
  • Quinn
  • Rakan
  • Samira
  • Swain
  • Thresh

Champion Nerfs

  • Cassiopeia
  • Galio
  • Tank Jayce
  • Miss Fortune
  • Rell
  • Skarner
  • Teemo
  • Viego

Watchers of pro play will be glad to see Skarner being brought down a peg or two, if only to remove him from his current insta-ban status.

That’s all there is to know right now. Make sure to check back into these patch notes as we continue to update them with specific data as more is revealed.

Sign up to Dexerto for free and receive:
Fewer Ads|Dark Mode|Deals in Gaming, TV and Movies, and Tech