Patch 26.7 Preview – League of Legends

The 26.7 patch preview for League of Legends is out, with another handful of champion buffs and nerfs. From @RiotPhroxon on X Source

26.7 Buffs

Cassiopeia

See Highest Win Rate Cassiopeia Builds

– Buffs to 2 areas that Cassiopeia thrives in; her initial mana pool for early all-ins when she tags with Q

– Her maxed E, to reinforce her sustained DPS identity

Kalista

See Highest Win Rate Kalista Builds

Kalista has fallen off significantly in priority in Pro Play, which means we can buff her for regular play!

– We’re focusing the power in the core area where people play her; her E damage

Rell

See Highest Win Rate Rell Builds

-Similarly, Rell has fallen off pretty significantly as well

– Her initial Ult damage will increase her threat in early all-ins, while her E will allow her to fulfil more of her mobile horse identity

26.7 Nerfs

Graves

See Highest Win Rate Graves Builds

Karma

See Highest Win Rate Karma Builds

Nami

See Highest Win Rate Nami Builds

Ornn

See Highest Win Rate Ornn Builds

– Ornn is just a little bit strong, especially given that he has a relatively steep mastery curve

Singed

See Highest Win Rate Singed Builds

– Singed is looking a bit too strong in especially normal play

– While this nerf looks like a bit of a meme, we expect it matters more than expected on paper just due to the number of stats impacted when ult is active

Veigar

See Highest Win Rate Veigar Builds

– Veigar is in a slightly strong spot for regular play midlane, but is really rocking the bot lane a bit too hard, especially in regular play

– The nerfs are targeted at R which sits at Rank 1 in bot lane for quite a lot longer than in solo lanes

Shyvana

Shyvana

See Highest Win Rate Shyvana Builds

We’re still working on a larger set of changes for Shyvana, but they haven’t been finalized yet (I mentioned the direction of

some of the changes yesterday)

For this patch, just a change to make Ultimate Haste interactions and also the Sylas interaction nerf from previously

Shyvana definitely initially landed a bit strong, and her hotfix put her in a decent spot after that. She has a bit of an unintended interaction with Sylas that we will be micropatching out tomorrow; essentially, he benefits double from her auto attacks’ passive (with Sylas’s passive) that makes his attacks do pretty eye-popping values.

We’re still taking our time to evaluate role viability for Top Shyvana and whether it’s reasonably supportable without destroying Jungle role satisfaction. We’ve also been working on some changes to increase the satisfaction of Passive, reduce MMR skew, increase counterplay and satisfaction of E

First Stand

The First Stand meta ended up being quite good; there was significant diversity in every role between classes. One notable gap was AP junglers and AD mids (related), and so we’ll see what we can do to enable some more of those picks heading into the Season. Was especially happy with the Bot meta; Lethality Varus had a 14% winrate, and there was a good mix of Casters, Hypercarries and Utility as well as many fringe picks like Zeri, Kog, etc.

Ranged Supports are really starting to get away from the rest of the pack now, with laning being a much larger focus due to role quests. Not necessarily a bad thing, though, given that we’ve been in Melee supp meta for many years. Game pacing overall felt good (or at least I thought so), and the lack of lane swaps really allowed each role to shine, with GigaBin showcasing the power of an unleashed Top lane role. It really did seem like every lane could carry and balance of objectives vs splitting felt pretty appropriate

Support Quest

A few patches ago, we talked about reducing the negative impact of the support quest to reduce complexity – We’re going to pull this all the way this patch. This may result in some farming support shenanigans, but then you’re also denying your bot carry their quest progression; we’re giving it a go to see if anything breaks