Patch 26.14 Preview: Locke's honeymoon ends as Riot cleans up before Summer

The Patch 26.14 preview was shared by Riot Phroxzon this week, with the update set to hit live servers on Wednesday, July 15 — a week later than usual, since Riot takes its annual break in the first week of July. Coming right after MSI 2026 wraps up and with Summer Split starting later this month, this is a light tuning patch — only ten champions and five systems touched — but it goes straight after the two names: Locke and Senna.

Mid lane: Locke gets his first real haircut

Locke, the newest champion in the game since his release in 26.13, takes the biggest hit of the patch. His Q loses damage on both the base nail and the stacking bonus, the recast hold time on the ability gets shorter, and his W's grey-health shield cap is cut nearly in half at higher ranks. Riot's own framing is that his early-game snowball is "a bit too high" for a champion whose power is otherwise mastery-gated — he sits near 50% win rate in Emerald+ but under 49% across all ranks, the same skill-skewed profile as a Katarina or Akshan. Expect his pick/ban presence to shrink, but not disappear — he was strong enough to shrug off a partial nerf.

Corki gets the opposite treatment: higher AD growth and a passive that refunds more cooldown per crit auto. It's a small, scaling-focused buff rather than a burst one, which fits his identity as a poke-and-siege mid who wants games to go long. Enough to nudge him back into rotation.

Seraphine takes a light poke nerf on her Q AP ratio — a small tax on her mid/support flex rather than a real identity shift.

Top lane: Garen's execute gets softer, Jayce loses more mobility

Garen's ultimate loses a flat chunk of its true-damage numbers while keeping the missing-health scaling untouched, directly targeting his execute threshold against squishier targets.

Jayce loses movement speed on his form swap and resistances on his hammer form — a nerf aimed squarely at his pro-play mobility and lane trades rather than his ranked floor. He earned it: at MSI 2026 he's gone 7-2 across 9 games for a 77.8% win rate, and sits as the tournament's most banned top laner so far (26).

Mordekaiser, gets more value out of winning his Death Realm duels — both the stat steal and his E damage go up.

Bot lane: Senna gets nerfed again, Nami and Yunara get a lifeline

Senna eats her third consecutive round of nerfs — reduced crit damage modifier, and both the slow and healing ratios on her Q get cut. She'd remained one of the strongest marksmen in the game despite last patch's changes, and Riot clearly isn't done.

Nami, that has almost disappeared from the priority list, gets a straightforward damage buff on her E poke — the tool that lets her hold lane and stay relevant past the laning phase. A real chance to bring her back as a priority engage/poke support.

Yunara picks up a clean AD growth buff, giving her a bit more late-game scaling without touching her kit.

Worth noting: Brand was initially slated for jungle buffs but got pulled from the patch entirely over concerns about mage bot lane, which Phroxzon called a "contentious topic" worth revisiting separately.

On the recurring complaint that mages bot post some of the highest win rates in the game, Phroxzon's counter is that the number is misleading rather than untrue: simple mages like Brand or Veigar have shallow mastery curves — barely 3-4% win rate gained after 50 games — while ADCs are harder to learn and look artificially suppressed by comparison, offset this season by faster marksman item-quest spikes. His actual answer to the debate isn't a nerf, it's a matchup one: Ezreal, Sivir, and Zeri, the three ADCs whose kits dodge mage skillshots outright and who want to reach two or three items and outscale rather than trade point-blank early.

Systems: a tax on early snowballing

Outside of champions, the changes target early-game power spikes. Hextech Rocketbelt trades burst for durability — its build path swaps Tome for Kindlegem, its cooldown goes from 40 to 50 seconds, and it loses 10 AP for 50 extra health. Immortal Path (the mid boots upgrade) and Jack of All Trades both lose damage and adaptive force at their breakpoints, while Protoplasm Harness gets more expensive and less tanky early. The lone system buff goes to Blue Buff, which now scales its Ability Haste by level instead of granting a flat 10 from minute one — a quality-of-life change more than a power shift.

Also arriving with 26.14: the T1 Worlds 2025 skin line (Gumayusi's Miss Fortune Prestige among them, following his Finals MVP) and the Victorious Rengar ranked reward skin.