Walter Misery González

Patch 26.18 Full Preview! Cassiopeia - Cassiopeia is in a pretty rough state for average players (~47% winrate), while being too strong in Pro Play and above average in Elite play - We're making some adjustments this patch to move some of her power around that retain her gameplay identity of being a strong early game champion (which is inherently pro skewed), but also giving her power back for regular players - We're also not looking to completely remove her from the meta, but just better balance across skill brackets - One of the ways we're attempting to accomplish this is by moving more of the power into her AP ratios over her base damages as Average players tend to purchase more AP - Her Q interaction with Deathfire Touch is also strong (though having synergistic effects with systems is a cool part of the champion), and so that rank 1 base damage is also coming down a bit Seraphine - As mentioned yesterday, Support Seraphine has been her most popular role for a long time - We're making E rank up incentives worse for the damage oriented roles, while intending for this to have relatively minimal impact for Support Seraphine who maxes this ability last Zeri - Zeri benefitted amongst other champions from the Hurricane changes - The Hurricane changes landed well and it feels like a real item again - That said, Zeri is now broadly a bit too strong, especially in Elite given her mastery profile - Our principles with items are to get the items in a good spot first and then get the champions into a good spot, which is why we wouldn't follow-up by nerfing Hurricane Ekko - Ekko is being targeted for a buff in Mid - We're giving him a waveclear buff and a mana buff, targeting his AP ratios as AP is often purchased more in mid and getting Lich Bane in mid is more typical than in Jungle - While buffing Ekko's waveclear capabilities are on the lower interaction side, we think it's important for the game to have a mix of high and low interaction laning patterns and as a roaming, tempo champion, having waveclear is important to get his snowball going Viego - Ever since we removed Divine Sunderer and nerfed Sundered Sky in a recent patch, Bruiser Viego has been worse than squishy Viego, which is intended, but that build is a little weaker than we'd like - Adding some explicit support for that build Zaahen - Zaahen is a little on the weak side after the last set of nerfs we did - We're also taking the opportunity to make his Q behavior coming out of revive more consistent - Before, you could get into de-synced states where your Q2 only has a short time to be used after reviving, etc.

Patch 26.17 Preview! This patch is mostly a stabilization patch after observing the adjustments made on 26.16. Mages bot overall have lost some amount of winrate across the board, but not a huge amount, which is roughly about the impact we're looking for. So far, we're seeing good skews on Poppy and Camille support with support nerfed and Top skews playing out well (in particular). We're still monitoring the impact of Hail of Blades on champions more broadly, eg. Yi, Trynd, Shaco, etc. Sundered Sky - Directionally, Sundered Sky and AP Jungle changes have been good, but magnitude is still off - We're putting another small-moderate nerf in for this patch and hoping to see more movement on AP jungles and Sundered Sky dominance in higher levels of play Stormrazor - Outside of Stormrazor Jhin, it doesn't have a large user base and we think it could have more power overall to broaden the user pool Champion wise, a pretty standard set of nerfs here, mainly for power impacting outliers.