The 26.5 full patch preview for League of Legends is out, with another handful of champion buffs and nerfs. From @RiotPhroxon on X Source
Ranked EUW Test delayed for another day, we’re playing it safe to land the changes without breaking anything
Volibear
- Voli changes are targeted at balancing out his AD builds vs his currently strong AP builds; needs a bit more time to land
Lillia
- We’re looking to pull back on some of the previous changes and bring Lillia’s power level most of the way back to where she was before
Orianna
- Changes are targeted at reducing the power level of her early laning phase, especially when sitting on Rank 1 Q for several levels
Neeko
- Neeko has been strong in Pro Play for a while while not being overly strong in regular play
- We’re taking some power out of her vision outputs which are better used in Pro Play without overly impacting her regular play
Varus
- Varus was overbuffed a while ago and so we’re practically reverting the buff to his Q damage
- Lethality Varus has been the strongest ADC in Pro and so we’re tapping him down to not overrun the Pro meta
Ranked EUW Test
- We ended up getting delayed and the new plan is to deploy around 6pm PST tomorrow (roughly 2-3AM EUW)
- There will be about 5-10m of Ranked downtime, so we’re doing this in off peak and monitoring that things are working correctly
First Stand on 26.5
- We made a significant number of changes on 26.4 and so 26.5 is a more conservative set of changes to ensure a good Pro meta for First Stand
- Ori, Azir, Neeko, Lethality Varus are some of the strongest outliers in Pro Play currently, and so we’re tapping them down
Items
- Hubris is looking just generally underpowered
- It doesn’t really have an audience and also doesn’t exhibit the same properties that other snowball items like Mejais have (higher winrates because being purchased when snowballing)
- Bandlepipes is looking pretty strong, especially on second item. Locket is one of its primary competitors so we’re giving it a buff on second item by flatting some of the shield value
Patch Followups
- Lillia is looking a bit worse for wear after her buffs in a previous patch were over magnitude, so we’re giving her a bump back up (it may end up getting delayed to a future patch if we need more time to land on a higher quality changelist, but haven’t decided)
- We’re looking to see what Mel looks like at a higher power level after making some of the frustration lowering changes in 26.3