Ethan

Patch 26.17 Full Preview! Roaming Supports - For the limited number of Pro games on 26.16, we've been seeing good movement on roaming supports and expect it to trickle down to solo queue over time (especially as players find the strategy less effective over time) - We'll still continue to monitor this and assess whether stronger swings are necessary, though we don't want to over-punish regular roaming and a small amount of unconvential roaming strategies is reasonable, so long as they don't become broadly optimal Xerath - As stated in previous posts/videos, while Xerath bot is a large part of the AP bot meta, we still think AP bots add to good long term variety and add a healthy frustration to the role - That said, Xerath is performing well in both Mid and Bot, especially for average play and is receiving a generic nerf across the board Vayne - Vayne top has been a strong champion in higher levels of play and also is a bit over the edge in terms of what we'd consider healthy types of available counterplay in many matchups - Broadly, ranged tops fill a similar niche to Mage bot, which is to add long term healthy variety to the role, even though it can be frustrating in the moment and that also adds to their satisfaction when overcome - One of the principles we hold here is that there needs to be counterplay to frustrating experiences; a combination of tactical (moment to moment) and strategic - For Vayne top specifically, she can be a combination of tanky (with Experimental Hexplate), with a strong laning phase, while scaling well - Overall, we think Vayne could have a bit of a weaker laning phase when played in top lane, to balance out these other attributes, but she is still going to be baseline on the frustrating side as a ranged champion that can be played top lane - We don't think it's too far off though and Vayne still has a structural weakness of being vulnerable to ganks, especially when she's pushing a lot and doesn't provide much team utility - This change hopefully results in her lane opponents having slightly more health in order to assist with gank attempts or trade back Yasuo and Yone - We're improving the incentives for Yone and Yasuo to build more Crit items in the short term, especially on first item so it can tip the scales in situations where they would otherwise build BORK and Kraken - Long term, we want them to feel good about buying Crit, but we know that none of the items feel quite right for them so that's an itemization hole that needs to be filled long term Leblanc - A while ago when Statikk Shiv was an extremely good one stop shop waveclear item, we had to nerf Leblanc's Attack Speed ratio - After we reworked Statikk Shiv to be more about on-hits, we didn't restore this ratio to Leblanc - So we're restoring this and giving her a small buff as she's not strong in any particular skill bracket Nasus - Last patch, we made some adjustments to Nasus trying to resolve some of his skew between roles and restore some of the stacking power to Top lane where it is inherently higher risk than Jungle - Structurally, we felt that balance was off - While we suspected this change would be over-magnitude, we wanted to get a clean read on the magnitude of this lever for Top vs JG and follow up this patch after seeing how much impact it had - This patch, we're reducing some of the net total sustain he gets in Top lane to make hitting those high stack counts a bit more challenging (incidentally, this lever doesn't affect Jungle as much)