Patch 26.22 Preview! Hearts go out to Cyanide and saddened to hear of his passing 😭; on top of being an incredible player, he was a super funny guy and many of his quotes are legendary. He will be missed :( Mel - Mel's mini-update will be Live on Patch 26.22 - When we released Mel, we intentionally went for a new ability that was pretty ambitious; we like to try to push the boundaries with new champions and mechanics to give players new puzzles to solve with each release - After being on Live for a while, it's clear that many players feel that Mel's reflect was too frustrating to play against - There are things in League that are allowed to be frustrating, as that can create a feeling of triumph when overcoming it and challenging players to grow, but there are some things that are too frustrating even given those upsides - Realistically, every champion should have something that they do uniquely that other players might feel is frustrating - So we're reworking Mel's W to keep the feeling of destroying projectiles, but not have it hard counter some subsets of the roster - We tried many versions of Mel's W that tried to retain the reflect, but we couldn't find one that would hit the mark for Mel players and would be satisfactory for opponents - We know this is disappointing for Mel players and we're sorry we couldn't uphold this end of the contract with you all - That said, we hope this will allow Mel to be balanced at relatively higher resting power levels and be more effective for Mel players Systems - Overlord's Bloodmail has been pretty weak overall and it's pretty hard bound to Sett as currently tuned - We're looking to try to buff this for other users who should be interested in an item that converts Health to Damage (Mundo, Sion), but some aspects of the item make it too Sett skewed [eg. the missing HP portion] - Doran's Bow has been a bit too strong relative to Doran's Blade, especially at higher levels of play - So we're looking to balance out the relative tradeoffs of the items a bit - We're overall happy wtih the direction of how the tradeoffs are playing out though! Just that the magnitude is a bit off

Patch 26.21 Full Preview! Credit to @RiotAuberaun for the suggestion to add pictures (it's a bit hard to see... but I think better than not having it) Bastionbreaker - We’re trying a pretty spicy change here to give Sabotage an infinite duration to help it serve its strategic niche better - This will also help us give these type of strategic outputs more value (which are often hard to put enough power in to be satisfying) and make Bastionbreaker holistically balanced without being overstatted Viktor - Overall, we don’t really think Viktor needs a major nerf here and the pattern of his long range hard to dodge poke is always going to be frustrating - We think that’s a pattern that’s worth preserving for Viktor and something that his players really enjoy about him - We think making his weakness more apparent (his inability to move around the map and weakness to ganks), while preserving his strengths is an appropriate way to keep players holistically happy without reducing Viktor’s satisfaction overall Yone - We’re opting to nerf Yone this patch, but not Yasuo, as while Yasuo rates highly on banrate, Yone is showing up significantly higher on our frustration surveys - Players are also more likely to play against a competent Yone than a Yasuo, so that factors into the overall perception of how powerful he is Locke - Locke has overall landed pretty well - One area we think is a bit off is his mana costs and how little consequences there are when he messes up - We do like his ability to have pop off moments and really high burst when he can meet his success conditions, but it should feel more risky when he messes up (eg. poor usage of W’s and spells in general) - We’re intending this to be an relatively power neutral adjustment and incentivizing Locke to rank up E second and have a higher amount of power in landing E1 (his W second is more powerful in many cases) Varus - The goals of the Varus changes are to reduce power in his lower gameplay W max builds, while moving power into his Q max builds which at least have something to dodge - This is also an attempt to make Varus Top vs Varus Bot more reasonable to play against for Top laners Caitlyn - Caitlyn has been one of the more frustrating champions for average players - That’s not inherently a bad thing, but we do think something about her strength and weakness profile is a bit off; in particular how much top end burst she can do with little warning - We want to move a bit of the power out of the some of the headshot damage and into her Q which can be more understandable and also make Q more worth casting later in the game Xin Zhao - Since the nerfs to Sundered Sky and repeated collateral nerfs to his AP build, Xin has been a little worse for wear - So we’re giving him a bit of power back for those attack oriented builds Lee Sin - Lee has been a little on the stronger side for a while after doing the adjustments to him in 26.10; we’re taking a bit of power out of how mobile he is (don’t think it’s super far off) - We think some of his point and click damage is a little on the higher end for how reliable it is and want a bit more of its value to be in using it to reposition enemies Tristana - Tristana’s level 1 power is a bit too strong, especially given its hyper synergy with Lethal Tempo - When Trist is succeeding, we think it’s a bit more appropriate from Rocket Jumping on opponents rather than just low gameplay outpushing enemies Azir - As a champion who doesn’t regularly purchase a mana item, regular players often struggle to manage their mana properly, whereas higher skill players are already handling this well Ryze - We’re looking to give Ryze stronger late game capabilities, so long as he’s able to get through his early laning phase - Right now, he is able to get a bit too much throughput from how much his EQs do in the early game Sion - This is a high fantasy buff, but we’ll be monitoring the magnitude to see if it’s over - One of the most fun things on Sion is when you ram your full powered R into someone