Edison Wang

Patch 26.19 Full Preview! Top Role Quest Teleport - In last week's Patch Rundown, I talked a bit about how role strength varies significantly in various regions - For example, Top Lane is extremely popular and powerful in lower skill brackets all the way through to medium skill (around Emerald), but starts to drop off in popularity after that - In the Eastern regions, it's relatively stable, even at higher skill brackets, contesting for the 3rd most popular position in some regions at high skill, however, in many of the Western regions, it is often near or close to the bottom at those higher skill brackets - Separating how fun the role to play from how powerful it is, it's pretty clear that players in those regions either think the role is not fun to play, not powerful or both - At present, both statistically, and feels wise, we think Top Lane is underpowered at those higher skill brackets (but not the lower or medium skill brackets) - Part of this is how at higher skill brackets, the power that Top loses appears to be gained by ADC's who are better at positioning, farming and don't get caught out as much, whereas a lower skill Garen for example can often walk up to an ADC and kill them (this still happens at higher skill, but not as often) - Our approach is to buff up the Top Lane teleport as that is better used by higher skill Top Laners and helps to reinforce the side lane raidboss split push identity that many Top laners have Support Tuning - We're moving some of the power of base health in the Support items into Health Regeneration to better benefit Melee Supports who are often on the receiving end of Ranged support poke and also makes Ranged Supports easier to kill - While this is a relatively small swing, we expect it to be subtly impactful at all levels of play Lucian - There was a lot of discussion about Lucian when the notes were revealed yesterday - Our current approach is to make Lucian's reliance on specific supports much less tightly bound - Lucian Mid and Top are also at extremely low power levels (high 30's/low 40's) which would be considered borderline griefing if picked - So we're trying to make the lives of Solo Q Lucian pairings more pleasant, while also trying to keep the list power neutral overall for Bot Lucian - This change is better framed as an adjustment, rather than the nerf that was listed yesterday Master Yi Q CD - For a long time (even after we removed Duskblade, which caused us to put this functionality in in the first place), Master Yi's Q Cooldown has scaled negatively with ability haste - Now that Duskblade isn't in the game we don't think this functionality is necessary anymore Nasus - Yesterday, I mentioned out philosophy for how we are going to balance simple champions - This patch, we're giving a flat 10 damage nerf to Nasus' Q so it's a bit harder for him to access his higher stack counts and can be punished more by lane opponents that can keep him down - We like his higher highs, but those need to be comboed with lower lows Ryze/Ori - We've pulled Orianna from the patch due to concerns about nerfing an already weak champion for regular Ranked play - For Ryze, we're looking at a roughly power neutral adjustment by nerfing his pushing power in the early lane and attempting a power neutral compensation to his durability - Ryze is often already one rotationing champs later in the game with Actualizer and so we're being cautious about compensating with damage output back