The preview for
League of Legends Patch 26.16 has been revealed. Only a limited number of champion balance changes are planned, with the patch featuring a handful of buffs and nerfs. The most significant adjustments, however, target several gameplay systems in an effort to reshape the current meta, particularly in the botlane.
Over the past few weeks, mages have become increasingly prevalent in both professional play and solo queue, to the point where marksmen are no longer the dominant class in their traditional role. In an effort to gradually restore them as the primary ADC picks, Riot Games will grant all marksmen additional magic resistance. Roaming supports are also expected to become less influential, thanks to adjustments to Camille and changes to the support quest system.
In addition, Riot Games is making several adjustments to the Tier 3 boots that midlaners can purchase after completing their in-game quest.
Buffs
Champions: Kennen, Gwen, Azir
System: Sunfire Aegis (item), Eclipse (item), Tiamat (item), Sterak’s Gage (item), T3 Sorc (Boots), T3 Berserker & Berserker (boots), Fleet (Runes), Jungler Pet
Nerfs
Champions: Poppy, Camille, Bel’Veth
System: Sundered Sky (Item), T3 Merc (Boots), Support Role Quest
Adjustments
Champions: Nasus
System: Hail of Blades (Runes), Black Cleaver (item), ADC Magic Resist
Read more about
League of Legends changes on the X account of
Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison.
Champions
- Azir has been pretty absent from both the Pro meta and showing low winrates in regular play, so we're looking to give him a buff.
- We've been noticing a bunch of players experimenting with Press the Attack and after investigating further, it looks decently strong. That said we're still looking to buff him a moderate amount
- We're giving a top focused buff to Gwen (where the healing will be more impactful) and also some scaling buffs to Kennen
- We don't think Kennen's lane needs a ton of extra help and haven't liked it too much when he's a super lane dominant pick; would rather he be picked for having huge ults
- Bel'Veth has been showing up pretty strongly for many players especially in the average skill bracket and is receiving a regular play skewed nerf (late game skewed)
- It's also trying to add a bit more power at specifically the level 6 spike
AD Fighters, AP Jungles and AD Mids
- We're also looking at several changes to encourage more AD mids (through some Berserkers buffs), as well as some buffs to the AP jungle pet damage (which has some positive meta effects on pairing with AD mids)
- This also includes a nerf to a pretty strong outlier in Sundered Sky, which is an item that does a lot of everything (healing, damage, durability)
- As a strong generalist item, we're bumping up some of its competitors so the 1st and 2nd item spaces are more contested for AD fighters and also more present on items that carry more sharp strengths and weaknesses
Sunfire
- We've heard a lot of the discussion around Sunfire Aegis
- Overall, Sunfire appreas to have a decent set of users and we think it's close to appropriately balanced
- We don't think it's a strong item fwiw, but also don't think it's a strictly weak item
- We're going to start with this set of changes and then reassess after the patch ships
ADC Magic Resist
- I made some comments on why we are giving Magic Resist to all ADC's in some follow-up threads that I'll link here for posterity
- We believe that it's important that the relationship between burst and ADC's is preserved regardless of which lanes they're played in. This may mean we need to follow up on some champs like Akshan, Kindred, etc. depending on how they land
- If we're making structural claim about a class, we should apply it broadly. Another maybe more clear example is base movespeed and immobile ADC's having 325 movespeed.
- Imagine we had a viable immobile ADC in the jungle and in Top and we were changing how fast immobile ADC's base movespeed (for some systemic reason) from 325 >>> 330 even though most of them live in bot.
- We would still buff Varus Top for example, even if he didn't need a buff and re-evaluate after. This follows the same principle. Of course we could balance Varus Top around still having 325 MS, but it's better to apply this systemic adjustment to the class for a variety of reasons. Maintainability, understandability, etc.
- We could for example balance every immobile adc around having a different movespeed but it makes understanding the relationship between adc's within the subclass and their movespeed difficult, makes it harder to maintain from a dev perspective, etc. (In fact, we've drifted from this over time and it's made it way harder to understand the rules that the ADC class is goverened by)
S3 Ranked Changes
- The S3 Ranked changes have been out for a few days now (with Patch 26.15) and we've been noticing meaningful improvement for match quality vs queue times in the metrics
- Am curious for (especially Apex players), are you noticing tighter matches and do the queue time changes seem worth it? Could we go further?
- For some of the smaller regions (MENA and OCE in particular), we are noticing some of those queue times jumping up pretty significantly to the point where some strong players can't find a game and so we're looking to pull back on some of the changes in those smaller regions some time during 26.16
