November 18, 2025

Patch 25.23 Notes

Chatted a bit yesterday about Zaahen starting out development as a support!
We hadn't made a support for a while and we already had a headstart on wanting Zaahen to be a Darkin with eye/all-seeing motifs.
The first iconic ult Squad5 tried was swinging his Glaive to Deathmark everybody (think Deathmark meets Xin Ult).
One of the issues with this was that Zaahen had a support economy, so he'd do this and just die. It wasn't a fatal flaw, but it wasn't quite cool enough to build a kit around.
Another idea tried was to embody the idea of sacrifice; Zaahen would gain stats each time he got a takedown or died (because supports die a lot).
Teammates weren't super enthusiastic about this though, even if it ended up being powerful and useful.
At this point, we decided that Top lane might be a better fit, especially because some of the Xin Zhao parallels weren't quite working out from the support role.

We were taking a bunch of inspiration from Erlang Shen and Guan Yu throughout development.
Erlang Shen has a third eye, which is often known for being all-seeing and associated with enlightment/higher levels of consciousness in Hinduism or Buddhism and some other Eastern religions.
So some of the ideas were related to these motifs.
Squad5 tried some ideas like Ult makes him untargetable to non-targeted abilities (think Gwen W), but this only lasted a test (was very experimental).
Also tried versions where he learned about his opponents while fighting them.
Another version that was interesting was dodging attacks every X seconds (but that became kinda hard to use and was already similar to old Pantheon's passive).
Kind of late in development however, we had a pretty functional kit that was working well and was satisfying, but it still felt it was missing something, and August suggested adding the revive back as max stacks on the passive.
That just immediately clicked in Playtest and so we kept it.
We hope you'll all enjoy Zaahen.

Rek'sai was erroneously listed as a buff yesterday, sorry about that.
For those watching Worlds, or playing high ELO solo Q, Rek'sai has been pretty pretty powerful in Top Lane, but we're OK with her Jungle strength currently.
In particular, she is sustaining too much, so we're taking those aspects down.

ADC meta has been stale for a while, so we're looking for a bit of a shake up here.
Most of the changes here are pretty self-explanatory.

Skarner has been pretty heavily overnerfed, so we're restoring a bunch of power to him this patch.