The 26.6 full patch preview for League of Legends is out, with another handful of champion buffs and nerfs. From @RiotPhroxon on X Source
Another push has been made to the LP gains in Apex. The plan is for this to be the final fix.
Note: The Xerath changes are a joke
Patch 26.6 Nerfs
Shen
See Highest Win Rate Shen Builds
Shen Jungle has really started to take off recently, which is really awesome to see! That said, he is a tad strong, especially in lower levels of play
Zaahen
See Highest Win Rate Zaahen Builds
We’re really happy to see Zaahen picking up a sizeable audience in both Top and Jungle, but now that regular players, in addition to experienced players are starting to demonstrate that top end mastery performance, he’s looking too strong across the board. Currently, we think his Jungle is a bit stronger than Top, so the nerfs are mostly focused there
Patch 26.6 Buffs
Skarner
See Highest Win Rate Skarner Builds
Skarner has been out of the spotlight for a while and since we’ve tapped down a few of the things that were causing him to be overbearing in Top (especially W max and the E point blank kidnaps), we think he can get a bit more power there
Olaf
See Highest Win Rate Olaf Builds
– These changes are targeted at Jungle, which has been languishing a bit
– Top is a little bit weak, so he will be getting buffed there a bit too
Azir
See Highest Win Rate Azir Builds
We’re buffing Azir to distribute some of his power back into regular play capabilities through scaling power that Azir players hopefully will appreciate
Lissandra
See Highest Win Rate Lissandra Builds
– Lissandra hasn’t really felt the same since her Q cooldown was nerfed in Season 9
– Times have really changed since then and her perma priority waveclear + aftershock taking days and in the vein of making champions feel better to play, we’re seeing if she can sustain having this cooldown again
Systems
- Chempunk Chainsword has been one of the weaker Grievous items for a while. While we don’t want Grievous items to become too commonplace, as it subtly degrades champion kits when too common, it is still just a bit weak for even that purpose
- The support item minion penalty has been a pain point for support users, and with role quests, the risk of funnelling (why it was there in the first place) has been reduced pretty significantly, so we’re removing that drawback
- Sunfire’s build cost (1000g) has long been cited as a pretty painful experience with the item. While we think having some painful build paths is valuable for the long term value of League, we think this one is a bit too painful
EUW/VN Matchmaking
- We’ve had about a week and a half now of autofill vs autofill matchmaking being Live and we’re seeing excellent results
- In regions like Vietnam with a high autofill rate, we’re seeing autofill vs autofill go from ~25% of games to 75% of games
- In EUW, regular play was already good (90% of the time autofill vs autofill), but in high MMR, we went from 30% to 85%
- We will continue to roll out to more regions over the coming patches as we’re seeing positive results here
Apex LP
- So far, so good on Apex LP fix resolving most of the issues. The fix looks to be good and is holding
- >98% of players should be between 19 and 21 in terms of LP gains, calibrating up and down in small amounts (+19/-21 or +21/-19 or +20/-20)
- We have one small fix coming in 26.6 to make this even more consistent