Last patch's nerf to Viktor hit him harder than we expected - but we are happy about the impact it had on his early game bullying, so we are buffing him back in scaling.
We've seen Kayle's relevance decrease steadily from earlier this year as the game's moved past the top lane shake up from role quests. We're giving her a small bump to help out her early laning since we believe that top lane could use some more scaling options.
Zaahen is living up to his scaling fantasies, but hasn't had enough to do in lane. This should make his early scrapping and skirmishing much more satisfying.
Missile Speed3800→ 3200 (takes .047s longer to travel to max range)
W - Rebuttal - Reworked
Retaliation Damage 35 / 40 / 45 / 50 / 55 (+10% AP), reduced to 5 / 10 / 15 / 20 / 25 (+5% AP) for subsequent hits against the same enemy, up to 7 retaliations per enemy for a total of 65 - 205 (+40% AP)
This patch, Mel is getting a midscope adjustment. You can read more about it here. For the spark notes version, she is having some power moved from early game to scaling, her W is being reworked into an Area-of-Effect missile destruction that retaliates rather than reflects effects, and her Q and R are getting adjustments to lower their cooldowns later on in the game so she can stack her passive to ever higher amounts.
Similar to Corki, Rumble was tuned for pro play. This change should help out the average rumble a bit more than pros when they catch back up to the patch cycle.
After a series of nerfs earlier this year, Naafiri has largely fallen out of mid lane entirely and has been pretty mediocre in the jungle. We're giving her a buff that should primarily help out her mid, bringing her role power closer to parity.
While Locke's performance in general is within reason, he's proven to be a much deeper champion than we initially expected and players who have reached that level of Locke play have shown him to still be clearly too strong, especially early game.
Our buffs a few patches ago landed a bit softer than we expected, but he's ended up with a good balance between his Crit and Caster builds, so we're giving him a more generic buff this time. We also expect the Doran's Bow nerf in this patch to help him out a bit.
The majority of Aurelion Sol players have made it pretty clear that they would much rather rank up his Singularity (E) second over his Astral Flight (W) even though it's a much weaker second max. We agree that his (E) is a very cool signature spell, so we're giving him a buff there to help make doing the intuitive fun thing the right thing.
Maokai has remained a very still tree this year, and has been almost entirely stuck in support. We're buffing him in a way that helps out his top and jungle more.
Along with Maokai, Shen jungle has been pushed too far out of the meta. We were watching to see if some of the previous patches' changes to help jungle tanks would bring him back up, but now we're confident we can just buff him .
We were on the fence last patch with whether Yasuo would also need a nerf like Yone, but he's also continued growing in winrate as players migrate to crit builds and banrate reflecting that so he's getting the same treatment.
