Patch 26.16 Preview! In 26.16, we are making several adjustments to systems that impact some of the meta developments around roaming supports, mages bot lane and some targeted nerfs to some strong items that are hampering meta diversity (eg. Sundered Sky). We're also looking to adjust certain items portions of the ADC facing systems (eg. Fleet, Hurricane, etc.) that have been weak and are in need of buffs. (Going to go into much more detail on the following topics in Patch Rundown) A small note about the PBE scrape for Sunfire: - There isn't currently an armor nerf to Sunfire, it is intended to be a net buff, in particular with an increase to its burn damage to champions while holding minion damage steady and increasing its cost to make a clearer choice point with Hollow Radiance. A note about Nasus: - After evaluating his most recent state, we don't think that Nasus Jungle is in need of a nerf right now (though he is present and popular, which is fine for a champion to be) - Nasus is a champ with quite a shallow mastery curve and a starting high level of proficiency for novices, so his high winrates can be misleading - We do think Nasus top is in need of a buff however, and so the current set of changes are targeted at giving a relative buff to Nasus top, while being power neutral on Jungle Mages Bot - While Mages Bot and roaming supports experienced a significant upswing in Pro Play in the weeks following MSI, over the past week in particular, their presence in Pro Play has experienced a pretty sharp downtrend - Teams seem a lot better at playing against it and in particular the roaming supports - That said, we still intend to make some changes to the dynamic to improve the quality of the experience in regular play in particular as well as tap down on Support roaming, which we think is undesirable gameplay overall (many ADC's weren't designed with being duelists in mind, 1v1 is less exciting & lower depth of gameplay, players enjoy the 2v2 lane, etc.) - Broadly, we're not looking to change the dynamic of some of the ways that these mage vs ADC matchups play out, even though they are being commonly requested by the community as they contribute to desirable class differentiation and satisfaction. We believe this is very important for League's long term longevity and diversity of play experience (in the same way we wouldn't by default nerf Assassins, without a combination of player frustration + design reasoning of why it makes the game better) - eg. Things like Mages having access to lots of mana on Lost Chapter, having different (and in many cases) situationally stronger power spikes than ADC's on certain breakpoints, ability to waveclear, etc. are core expectations, satisfaction points and areas of gameplay differentiation for the class - There is a level of player frustration where we would tone back on some of these elements, but don't believe the current situation meets that threshold and that a combination of small nudges will make an impact - For regular players in particular, where we want to give ADC's back some power in surviving some of the early magic damage from champs that aren't typically seen in Pro Play and are frequently killing them in early lane (eg. Brand, Swain, etc.) and buffing some of the weaker systems pieces of the class (Berskers, Fleet, etc.) Roaming Supports - While the Roaming Support gameplay can be interesting when seeing it every few games, the current state of it is a bridge too far - Many supports in the current Pro Play metagame are defined by their ability to leave the lane at level 3 and worse is copycats in regular play thinking they're able to do it and griefing the whole game over it - As mentioned above, we also think the gameplay patterns of this are pretty undesirable - We're making some targeted adjustments to the support role quest to penalize some of these roaming behaviors and targeted anti-support skewed nerfs to Poppy, Camille and Hail of Blades (which is predominantly used by many of these champions) - For Camille in particular, we're looking to move some of her power from support to Top lane - For now, we're not looking to nerf the comeback XP as we want to see how impactful the out of lane penalty is and the comeback XP plays an important role in anti-snowballing + helping players who accidentally disconnected (among other things) - In theory, extending the out of lane penalty will also mean that supports are returning to lane around level 5, which also reduces the impact of the comeback XP at the relevant XP breakpoints More on other things later