Everyone’s favorite talking Bandle cat is getting a hotfix buff just hours after recent League nerfs punted her win rate into brutally low territory.
It seemed as though the Magical Cat was finally unperched from her nearly ever-present spot atop the meta. But after overshooting the nerfs to her general power in the most recent League patch, Riot has decided not to revert the nerfs, but rather to put power back into her kit in other areas.
In patch 12.16, Zoomies (E) received significant nerfs that increased its cooldown late in games and slashed the AP ratio on the bonus movement and attack speed from 6% to 2%. These nerfs came after additional ones to Zoomies and other parts of her kit in patches 12.14 and 12.12.
Matt “Phroxzon” Leung-Harrison, the lead designer on League‘s Balance Team, tweeted out the update late Wednesday night, saying that while the team feels her E is in fact in a better long-term spot as a result of the nerfs, she was just too weak overall.
As a result, Prowling Projectile (Q) is receiving quite the healthy serving of buffs.
The base damage on both the empowered and unempowered iterations of the ability is going up massively late, by as much as 50 damage, as well as doing an additional 1% of the target’s current health.
On top of that, Final Chapter (R) is losing 20 seconds off its cooldown at rank one, and 10 at rank two while leaving rank three untouched.
Phroxzon added that the goal with Yuumi is to have her be much more focused on providing her AD carry buffs instead of bruisers, where her priority can be too heavily nowadays.
According to LoLalytics, her winrate in Plat+ since the recent release of patch 12.16 has cratered to just 45.22% at the time of writing.
To be fair, it hadn’t gone above 50% in solo queue in a few patches, and this was a more pro-focused nerf, but Riot is clearly anticipating the negative consequences for the champion were going to be too drastic.
