LBoogie

Patch 26.02 Full Preview! Jungle - Some of the main changes this patch are re-distributing some of the jungle power - This includes buffs to some of the AD junglers like Aatrox, Master Yi, Viego, Trynd (micropatched last patch) and nerfs to some of the outliers like Zed, Jayce who has been strong for a while - Several of the AP or Tank junglers have really benefitted from being able to kill Epic monsters from increased pet damage, where they otherwise previously lacked DPS to do so and so they're being tapped down a bit as well - We expect that this shift within the Jungle role itself is going to have ripple effects into Pro Play, but are waiting to see the outcomes of this before taking larger swings and having Junglers hold more dominion over Epic monsters is an intended directional adjustment Game Strategy - One of our major goals with this season was bring into better balance the 3 major strategic decisions - Sieging, Grouping for Objectives & Split Pushing are all intended to play a part - In 2025 in particular, Grouping for Objectives was by far the dominant strategy, so the adjustments to tower plates, homeguards, minion spawn rate and nerfs to objective power were intended to change some of this balance - In particular, it was hard to justify hitting towers sometimes without rewards for doing so and in some situations, champions were ready to hit towers, but there just weren't minions in the right place at the right time to facilitate that especially in the sidelanes - We're curious to see how strategy for this evolves over the course of the Season