Patch 7.10 Notes

Heimerdinger

ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ It’s been quite a while since Heimerdinger got any attention. His “nest of autonomous turrets” fantasy is unique, but when AI-controlled units comprise the bulk of Heimer’s strength, it becomes difficult to get Heimerdinger to a fair spot. On the one hand, Heimer deserves to be competitive against opponents who know the ins and outs of turret behavior. On the other, when turrets are intelligent enough to fight enemies without Heimer’s assistance, they become overly punishing against players (and champions) who lack the ability to out-manipulate their AI.

That brings us to today’s update, which puts Heimerdinger more squarely in the driver’s seat of his turret gameplay. We’ve removed a number of turret “self-preservation” rules, meaning that deploying a turret is much less of a fire-and-forget affair. Rocket and grenade hits are now the primary means by which turrets charge their laser attacks, meaning Heimer needs to play an active role in fights to unleash their full potential. We’ve given power-ups to W and E to ensure Heimerdinger feels good about using the rest of his kit, which means he’ll also have more of an impact in fights where he’s unable to prep his turrets in advance.

Overall, this update gives the Revered Inventor more playmaking potential and fairer interactions with other champions. As always, we’ll be observing his statistical performance closely as his update deploys to live environments. Should any unexpected fluctuations in the trajectory of his aggregate data require further modulation of output variables, we’ll do appropriate science to get him in a stable spot. ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ

Base stats

NEWPassive - Hextech Affinity

Q - H-28G Evolution Turret

W - Hextech Micro-Rockets

E - CH-2 Electron Storm Grenade

UPGRADE!!!’d E - CH-3X Lightning Grenade

Rammus

While we originally passed on Rammus when planning our midseason work, we landed on an opportunity to give him some love later on in the process. Rammus’s playstyle, like his vocabulary, is overly simple: if he can navigate through a fight and Powerball a juicy target, the rest of his abilities are basically no-brainers. Once he’s in the enemy team, of course he wants to Taunt a priority target and of course he wants to be extra tanky and of course he wants to do damage. There weren’t enough points where he needed to think about when to use his abilities.

Reducing Powerball’s duration but having Rammus go faster more often will allow him to decide when he wants to try and chase someone or just back up. When he does go in, we’re giving his other skills slightly more complexity to give him decisions about how he wants to use them. Curling up will still make him incredibly tanky but at the expense of movespeed, and his ult will now steadily stack a slow on people around him. Now, the Armordillo has to decide whether to slow one target to a crawl, or stand still while he takes the heat for the team.

NEWPassive - Spiked Shell

Q - Powerball

W - Defensive Ball Curl

E - Frenzying Taunt

R - Tremors

Cassiopeia

For real thissssssssss time.

General

Fizz

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before - a sticky assassin builds primarily defensively and yet still does enough damage to threaten tanks and squishies alike. Fizz’s changes this patch are just another shade of updates past - paring down his base damage while boosting his scaling to compensate.

W - Seastone Trident

Graves

Despite changes earlier in the season, we’re still seeing enemies of the Outlaw torn asunder. Our approach this patch is to hit his early game in two-pronged fashion. First, we’re shifting some of End of the Line’s power to its bonus attack damage ratios, reducing his early game burst. We’re also hitting Collateral Damage’s cooldown in the early game, as it can often feel like his ult is always available. This should force Graves to really consider the best time to use Collateral Damage, rather than just firing it on cooldown.

Q - End of the Line

R - Collateral Damage

Jax

For a character whose gameplay revolves around basic attacks, Jax’s attack animations left some to be desired.

General

Ivern

As Ivern players have gotten better at planning jungle routes - or adapting them on the fly - one thing has become clear: he is too able to keep one step ahead of opposing junglers. The relatively low costs on Friend of the Forest give Ivern insanely flexible paths, which means even when opposing teams do a good job at tracking him, he’s able to change plans without much cost. Specifically, his ability to save Smite for clearspeed - and not require its sustain - allows him to save smite for invades without sacrificing much in the way of channeling his own camps.

Base stats

Passive - Friend of the Forest

Lee Sin

Lee Sin has more uptime than almost any jungler, thanks to how easily he can move around the map and how often his ultimate is up. The Blind Monk already has two gap-closers that let him chase - or escape - enemy champions. Having best-in-class movement speed on top of that seemed like overkill.

Base stats

R - Dragon's Rage

Lulu

Lulu’s become the pick when you want someone with a bit of everything - Aggression? She has it. Protection? She has it. The problem gets real when the Fae Sorceress becomes the best option in both cases, outshining the rest of the enchantress club. We’re leaving Lulu’s poke and trade potential intact, but softening her durability so opponents can better punish missteps and poorly-chosen trades.

Base stats

E - Help, Pix!

Kassadin

It’s time, Kassadin.

E - Force Pulse

Maokai

While Maokai’s update gave him the desired incentives to play around brush, empowered saplings are dealing too much damage in the early game (especially if maxed first). This is particularly prevalent at game-start: a single empowered sapling massively interferes with the enemy jungler’s initial clear. We’re reining in sapling damage so E spam doesn’t remain the strongest thing Maokai can do.

With saplings powered down in the early game, we wanted to be sure Maokai still has the strength he needs to make it through the jungle and top lane. We’re upping the impact of his melee-range tools to give him the means to hold his own mid-combat.

Passive - Sap Magic

Q - Bramble Smash

E - Sapling Toss

R - Nature's Grasp

Rakan

While other enchanters like Janna and Lulu naturally want to max their shields, that doesn’t seem particularly appropriate for Rakan. Rather than perpetually clinging to allies, the Charmer should feel good about busting a move in the middle of the enemy team. We’re rescaling a few of Rakan’s ability level-up incentives to encourage him to hit the dance floor.

We’re also giving Gleaming Quill’s cast range a bump. Rakan’s healing is potent on paper, but in practice, he doesn’t get to take advantage of it as often as as you’d expect. A range increase should provide Rakan better access to his healing, particularly in his more punishing matchups.

Q - Gleaming Quill

W - Grand Entrance

E - Battle Dance

Renekton

W - Ruthless Predator

E - Slice and Dice

Riven

While animation cancelling has been integrated into Riven’s coding for some time now, there are still a lot of timing inconsistencies that make learning her frustrating, especially for players on higher-latency connections. We’re cleaning these up so mastering Riven feels like a test of your reflexes, not your internet connection.

General

Passive - Runic Blade

Q - Broken Wings

E - Valor

Sejuani

Sejuani came out of the midseason gates more ferociously than we had intended. Her mid-patch follow up brought her much closer to an acceptable balance state but Frost Armor is still out of line in early game fights (particularly in lane). With these changes, the Fury of the North will still be tough while Frost Armor is up in the late game, but won’t be as overbearing in early scraps.

Passive - Fury of the North

Q - Arctic Assault

W - Winter's Wrath

Udyr

Back in 7.8 we made some adjustments to everyone’s favorite ManBearTigerTurtlePhoenixMonkey. Within that set of changes we tweaked Udyr’s mana costs to decrease per level rather than spell rank. The aim was to make low-rank abilities less of a drain on Udyr’s mana overall, but he lost the ability to aggressively reduce the mana costs of his main stances in the process. We’re further reducing his mana costs across the board, allowing him to go about his shapeshifting business less inhibited. We’ll likely have more follow-up changes once we’ve seen how a non-OOM’d Udyr performs, but for now you can spam to your heart's content, dear Udyr main.

General

Yorick

Yorick is pretty reliant on his summoned units, whether that’s graves, Mist Walkers, or The Maiden. Some of those units had unintuitive or frustrating behavior, so we’ve made some quality of life changes.

Passive - Shepherd of Souls

Q - Last Rites

R - Eulogy of the Isles

Zac

We’ve seen steady improvement in Zac’s performance since his update landed, but there are a few rough edges to smooth out while things are still malleable. Most notably, we were overly cautious in preventing Elastic Slingshot’s knockup from guaranteeing Let’s Bounce!’s kidnap, which has left Zac’s signature move feeling pretty flat. We’re restoring Slingshot’s oomph as a long-range initiation tool and slightly bumping up Let’s Bounce!’s channel time to preserve a brief window for enemies to panic-Flash the kidnap. We’ve also got a suite of improvements for Stretching Strikes. Many are usability improvements: the slam effect is more reliable against jungle camps and minion waves, and Zac won’t lock himself out of his other skills for as long. Toss in a few direct power-ups, and Stretching Strikes should pack more of a punch across the board.

Q - Stretching Strikes

E - Elastic Slingshot

R - Let's Bounce!

Spirit Visage

Spirit Visage is still occupying the slot of “magic resist item you want most of the time”. To leave room for competitor items to shine against magic damage, we’re toning down overall stat pool and shifting its magic resist down a little bit.