Buffs and nerfs to Ahri, Graves, Urgot, Swain, and Darius in this episode of the Patch Preview.
Welcome to the League of Legends Patch Preview. I’m Phreak and I’m here with Morello, Lead Champion Designer.
Together we’ll be discussing some changes coming into the Draven patch. I’ll introduce the topics, and Morello will give you the rationale behind the changes.
Ahri is an almost guaranteed pick or ban in competitive play.
She gets to deal tons of damage despite building pretty tanky, so we’re lowering the base damages on Fox-Fire and Spirit Rush but compensating with increased AP ratios.
What are we hoping this does for Ahri?
Ahri really fits the role of a ranged mage assassin and as such she should be building high damage and low survivability to get the job done.
Ahri’s ultimate has a ton of mobility built in, and this is how she should be getting around the battlefield and surviving team fights.
So if Ahri’s building tanky items, you will see her damage go down, and this is the build that pros have been using to dominate with her.
However, if you are building that offensive build with a Deathcap, you will be rewarded for that build choice.
In addition to his short-range burst power, Graves currently brings too much damage and utility at range.
To fix this, we’re lowering the base damage on Buckshot but compensating with increased damage on multiple hits, while reducing the duration on Smoke Screen by one second.
Why will this help balance out Graves?
The interesting thing Graves is supposed to bring to the table is that short-range Buckshot blast that does a lot of damage.
The problem is that he doesn’t have to take that risk at all; he can just sit back and still out-perform other ranged carries.
Now playing Graves from a “sit back and be safe” standpoint is going to be weaker, but if you take risks and get in people’s faces you’ll be rewarded for it.
Simply put, Smoke Screen was shutting off an area of combat for too long, so we reduced the duration by a second, bringing the duration much more in line.
Urgot is currently able to dominate other champions early game with his bullying power and innate tankiness, making him overpowered in lane.
In order to solve this, we’re lowering the base values on his shield and the bonus resistances on his ultimate. Why did we choose these nerfs for Urgot? 00:02:08.600,00:01:38.000 Urgot’s combination of high range and high defenses means that a lot of champions didn’t have any counter play options against him at all.
We want champions to make interesting choices and Urgot walking up and being able to duel pretty much anyone because of his inherent defense isn’t a very interesting choice.
It’s also not very fun for his opponents to just die because of that, either. All the things that make Urgot special are intact:
The long-range lock-on gameplay, swapping enemies into position, all those things make him fun and we want to keep those there.
Swain is a pretty overlooked mage champion, and it seems to be because he just doesn’t quite have the same tools as other mages.
Next patch, Swain is getting increased range on his basic attacks, increased range and slow on Decrepify, and a lower cooldown on his ultimate.
How do we think these buffs will help Swain?
Looking at all of our mages, we saw an opportunity to make Swain feel a lot better.
The range increase is a way for us to bring him up in line with other mages and put him on equal footing.
Frankly, the slow on rank 5 Decrepify was really underwhelming. Increasing this allows Swain to feel a lot better about using his slow, especially later game when it needs to be more effective.
Swain’s ultimate is integral to the whole way he plays and flows and he needs to get back into that state more quickly after turning it off.
Darius has two issues we’re looking to solve in this patch:
His best-case scenario against other melee champions makes him incredibly overbearing, and the cooldown refresh on his ultimate is just happening too often.
In the Draven update, the AD ratio on Hemorrhage is going down, and the grace period on Noxian Guillotine is being removed:
It will now only refresh if it actually deals the killing blow. Why did we pick these changes?
We lowered the AD ratio on Hemorrhage because he was simply too much fo a bully in lane.
Noxian Guillotine is really there to allow you to pick up those quadra or pentakills in about every 30-35 games by design.
But with the grace period, people were doing it much more frequently, causing it to be much more frustrating.
By removing the grace period, Darius needs to have better timing and be more skilled in order to pick up these multi-kills.
Ultimately these changes are designed to make Darius less frustrating to play against, but we’re going to continue to keep an eye on his balance going forward.
Thanks for tuning into the League of Legends Patch Preview.
Please subscribe to the Riot Games YouTube channel above and let us know what you think in the comments just below the video!