$ cat lol/patch/26.15
82 changes. Source: official patch notes.
Ever since the loss of Mobility Boots / Symbiotic Soles, Alistar has felt constrained in his gameplay, to the point he's failing to compete in the current meta even though it favors roaming supports - a space we expect him to excel in.
This patch, we're launching a set of Bel'Veth changes that are aimed at making her gameplay pattern a bit less focused around her early game, in order to allow her to fulfill her fantasy as a late game scaling champion. The major changes here are making her Q at early levels function more like a regular dueling ability in order to reduce just how heavily she can put certain champions behind with early invades. Historically, this Q tuning has caused us to repeatedly balance around her very early strength at a loss to many of her other more core functions. While we acknowledge that there's a subset of Bel'Veth players who love this capability, broadly, we think it's paying too many tradeoffs for the rest of her audience. We are looking to move some of her early game power to her mid and late game by leaning more on her evolution fantasy and her stacking mechanic. We believe that high moments like having form until death when you have gotten enough stacks feels like a transformative yet exciting moment that lines up a bit more with her kit expectations.
Despite the recent buff, Kai’sa remains weaker than expected, especially late game for a marksman who is supposed to hyperscale to make up for her short range. We’re tapping up her scaling to help her output as she nears her final form.
Locke continues to climb the mastery curve, so we’re continuing nerfs to keep him in line. Particularly, we observe his early game to be clearly over, even for a snowball reliant assassin, and we also want to avoid W 2nd max as optimal as it gives him too much safety for the risks he should need to take.
Maokai has gradually faded out of both top and jungle play since our last major work on him. We think that ultimately his top laning experience is not the greatest for all parties involved, so for now we are mainly focused on buffing his jungle back up, where we think he has a fairly unique output as a zone controlling tank.
We overshot last patch with the R buffs, and after re-assessing what he looks like with a meaningfully stronger ult, decided to instead revert the R buff entirely in favor of improving his ability to catch and keep opponents in his range. Accounting for the bugfix for his R, we believe these two adjustments to his E will be a net positive from 26.13 and will keep an eye on his performance.
Naafiri remains a hot topic in the meta, both for solo queue and pro play. While we are quite happy with how many people have taken her up since her rework, she’s still on the strong end, especially when she really gets the ball rolling with back-to-back-to-back ultimates.
Endless Hunger's addition to the game has given Riven an extremely potent new tool that fits her play pattern almost perfectly. While we feel we've gotten it into a fairly good spot among most users, Riven is notably overperforming. Targeting her R’s AD scaling (heavy synergy with Endless Hunger haste, mid quest scaling) will impact all her spells and how unstoppable her snowballing can feel, while still leaving a lot of room for her high moments.
After his buff in 26.12, it was clear that we moderately overshot our target. We’re pulling back the chains a tad to prevent him from bullying too hard.
Since our direct and systemic adjustments, the bear has been hibernating from dusk till dawn for a couple patches… we’re giving him more chances to gap close, especially for laners, without raising his already thrilling ceiling of spell chaining.
We believe that Zac brings unique gameplay and class diversity to the jungle. That said, his presence in the jungle has fallen quite a bit over the more recent patches. We believe giving him a bit more opportunity to execute on his distinct gank angles as well as a bit of durability in a team fight can help lift up our favorite secret weapon.
The item has been near bottom pickrate since release, and the distance between it and the next least popular Lethality item is quite far. We’re making it both more accessible and slightly stronger on its less noticeable effect, because we find that lethality users putting more of their gold into utility and progressing the team game is healthy in the long term.
Terminus is meant to be one of the premium capstone items for scaling On-Hit builds, but has been more of a mid game spike item than a true late game scaling option, leaving the on-hit space a bit sparse for options later on.
Yun Tal Wildarrows has fallen significantly over this year from its spot as the go-to scaling crit item. We believe the game continues to benefit from its function as a scaling option, so we are buffing it up to compete with the broader array of early crit items currently on offer.
Different statlines are much more accessible with items like Endless Hunger/Gluttonous Greaves/DHelm, and even though we love players shooting for creative builds to utilize JOAT, it definitely has room to be weaker both early and late while still giving a ton of bang for your buck.