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League of Legends is one of the most popular multiplayer games right now, with people streaming constantly on Twitch, a dedicated YouTube following, and the official forums flooded with daily traffic.

Still, it seems the new 3.9 patch has gone relatively under the radar with all of the Jayce nerfing in PBE (the public beta testing version of LoL) news...and of course the endless coverage of Lucian (the new champion due to be released in a month or so).

As a result, I thought I'd write up a quick article discussing some of the changes made to champions as listed in the official Riot Games announcement section.

Perhaps the most interesting patch was the rework of Draven's passive. Previously, Draven got extra damage from his passive, making him very difficult to lane against early game. Now, they completely scrapped his old passive and gave him a new one that states, "When Draven catches a Spinning Axe, or kills a minion or monster, he gains one stack of Adoration. When Draven kills an enemy champion, he consumes half of his Adoration stacks and gains 3 gold per stack consumed. Draven loses half of his Adoration stacks upon death." At first this may seem like a cheap knock off of Twisted Fate's passive, but in reality this passive works well to help Draven farm some gold and help lanes out with extra wards or even an early BF Sword. I'm not super thrilled about the passive change, but given his dominance in ranked games, something needed to be done.

Another worthwhile change was the alteration of the cooldown time on Jayce's acceleration gate. Previously, the cooldown was reduced when the skill was upgraded (14/13/12/11/10 seconds), but now it is a flat 16 seconds. This makes it so Jayce isn't so dependent on his acceleration gate poke combo while in his cannon stance. This is definitely a nerf, but if the PBE changes take effect, Jayce is going to be completely reworked and it doesn't seem for the better. So, if you like playing him, go ahead and do so even after the patch, as he is probably only going to get worse.

One other interesting note in 3.9 is that champions who switch forms like Jayce or Elise won't be able to trigger the stacking of Tear of the Goddess from it, which was a commonly abused tactic to get those charges up to 750 as soon as possible. It is also worth noting that Tear was recently changed so that there is an 8 second cooldown after two abilities trigger the stacks (two abilities within a short time of one another).

Overall, I'm pretty happy with this patch. It was a pretty major patch in terms of balancing, and they added a few new features like a different loading screen before getting into games, or the new Riven default avatar/card. I'm a little annoyed by the constant champion changes, because you rarely have issues with them in normal games, and it seems like Riot (like so many other game companies now) are catering toward the competitive crowd.

Be sure to check out the link below for a video and a full version of the patch notes, which contain many other interesting changes, like a large change to Shyvana and some minor changes to several other champions.

Source: http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?t=3641809