Despite the excitement of jumping into the League of Legends preseason with Patch 9.23, some glaring issues seemed to have slipped through the cracks. Today’s hotfix looks to balance out the outliers.
Riot lead gameplay designer Mark “Scruffy” Yetter broke down the details of the hotfix on Twitter today. Ezreal and new rune Prototype: Omnistone are getting some love so they can hang with their competitors. Sanguine Blade and the Elder Dragon buff, on the other hand, needed to be quelled before getting out of hand.
The removal of Kleptomancy left a void in the few champions that actually used the rune—one of which was Ezreal. And even though Riot devs decided not to balance League champions with Patch 9.23, saving potential problems for the next update, the Explorer needed tending to.
To compensate for the loss of Klepto, Ezreal’s base stats and Mystic Shot (Q) are improving drastically. The marksman’s health is going from 491 to 500, his mana is increasing from 360 to 375, and his mana regeneration is jumping from 8.092 to 8.5. And the icing on the cake? Mystic Shot’s damage is buffed by five at all levels.
League’s new rune is also not performing as well as developers had thought. Prototype: Omnistone rerolls Keystones when out of combat, allowing champions to potentially use every rune. The cool down between Keystone switches, for both melee and ranged champs, is being reduced by one second at all levels.
And the new overpowered Lethality item, Sanguine Blade, had little counter play. It’s passive, Blood Pursuit, gives additional lethality and attack speed when facing only one opponent. The attack speed Blood Pursuit grants was 40 to 100 previously, but will be changed to 20 to 80 percent. It’s combined cost is also going up by 100 gold.
Scruffy announced earlier today that the Elder Dragon buff wasn’t working as intended. The execution on the buff is supposed to only proc when the opponent is at 20 percent health. But the buff wasn’t taking mitigation into consideration, and was executing some players with health over 50 percent. Today’s hotfix addressed this issue as well, reverting the Elder Dragon buff back to what it was supposed to be.
Now players can hopefully jump back into the preseason without worrying about exploding at half health.
