RandomBirb

Mages Bot and Approach for 26.16 26.15 Rundown releasing later tonight; got a bit delayed this week Mages Bot in Pro Play - While Mages Bot at MSI only represented ~20% of picks (and often felt like much more), we have been seeing a significant uptick in their presence and priority at EWC and Kespa Cup and it seems only likely to continue increasing - This presence has also started to trickle its way into Ranked play in a major way - Only a few months ago in March, we were seeing a significantly Enchanter and range dominated support meta, which also resulted in ADC and hyper carries in bot lane being very powerful - These champions benefitted a lot from the Season Start 2026 changes; from things like the ADC quest hyperscaling with Enchanters + changes to nerf roaming in the support role generally - So in Patch 26.11, we made some adjustments to buff melee supports, nerf ranged supports, especially Enchanters - But at the same time, some certain chefs were also cooking some clever ways to bypass some of the anti-roaming and lane swap controls that we added into the Support quests at the start of the year - What resulted was 2 major swings towards roaming supports and away from ADC bot (it’s an interesting thought experiment for what would have happened if we had changed nothing about the First Stand Enchanter meta and had the roaming developments play out) - While we overall like Mages bot being viable in some capacity, what we’re observing now is arguably too far of a swing in the other direction, players are familiar with and we still want to support ADC as being a primary supported class there - All of the previously listed dissatisfactions with gameplay that led us to nerf support roaming in Season Start 2026 still stand and in that set of changes, we intentionally went a bit lighter on some of the anti-lane swap, anti-support roaming controls to avoid overly punishing either accidental roaming or unique playstyles - We’ve also heard a lot of the Pro Player complaints about the meta and are taking that into consideration - We don’t want to force them to suddenly completely swap subclasses by suddenly making ADC and that learnt skill expression unviable, so it’s a fine balance - That said, for those who want to learn it, we want to encourage and allow for skill expression of Pros to play a variety of things resulting in more flexible comps, dynamic lanes, etc. and greater champ variety long term Mages Bot in Regular Play - A lot of this “excitement” has also made its way to regular play - Players have been excited to try out Mages bot. That said, not everyone is excited about that; Mages represent a natural counter to ADC for a decent chunk of the game duration and people trying to replicate the Pro Play Support roaming style often causes more grief to their lane partners than benefit - Overall, we like that Mages are playable bot as it adds to a lot of variety in the lane and the games that players play - However, too many mages bot with them being too powerful in certain cases results in undermining a lot of the mastery and expectations of what can be played in the lanes - We’re not looking to adjust this power dynamic significantly as a result (eg. Mages have earlier spiking, smoother scaling curves. ADC have later & stronger scaling, but sharper successes and failures), but we are looking to address some of the magnitude of differences to make some of them less extreme - eg. Flattening the differences between Mages and ADC bot so they have the same smooth builds, the same amount of mana, similar levels of spikes, etc. is a quick way to make it so there’s no class differentiation, even if it would “solve the problem” - The profile of Mages in bot lane is also quite dissimilar to how they manifest in Pro Play - For several years now, Mages bot like Brand, Swain, Ziggs, Veigar, Seraphine, Xerath etc. often don’t win by allowing a support to roam (especially historically), they often win by either poking you out with the support or 2v2 killing especially in average play - They also have higher winrates on account of having higher starting winrates for first time plays compared to ADC, shallow mastery curves and favorable matchups in some (but not all) cases against ADC - Their winrates as a result, I think are misleading for their true power level, in the same way that one shouldn’t be alarmed by Malphite having a 52-53% winrate (high winrate as a novice, low skill growth) What are we doing? - In 26.16 we will be making some targeted adjustments to these dynamics; some examples - Straight nerfs to support roaming using already established levers (starting at upping out of lane support gold/xp penalty from 25% until level 3 >>> 33% until level 5 - Buffs to some underpowered ADC tools (Berserker’s Greaves, Fleet) - Buffs to ADC base MR, nerfs to MR growth - Buffs to Heal - We’re also testing a variety of speculative things; will share more later in the week once we’re more firm on tactics Thank you to everyone for all your passion and thoughts on these topics. We want to strike the right balance between increasing and rewarding diversity of playstyles in the game; the rate of these adoptions and how much burden we’re putting on the player base and Pro Players for said diversity

Regardless what you think of this pretentious dorks coaching ability he does not understand game desgin. What hes saying here is an obvious false dichotomy. In reality it would be laughably easy fix the botlane meta (there are litterally role quests with rewards that Riot can change into whatever they want)

There is no way they actually removed 5v5 qp for this... Im really trying to stay positive but i cant, why do i even keep buying skins when i cant even play the game anymore, i do not like 6v6 and id rather not play at all than play that, this is not the game i fell in love...

LoL Classic base Lux model in-game

It’ll take more than a few guards to get in the way of this family reunion 🦊 Join Sally Amaki, the voice actor behind Kiriko, for a reading of our newest comic, ‘Paths We Choose.’

Patch 26.14 Full Preview! Mages Bot - we've pulled brand from the patch given the concerns around mages bot - that said, we know this is a contentious topic, and I'll give some high level thoughts on how we see the situation (and more detailed thoughts in the patch rundown) - we see mages bot as creating healthy diversity for the bot lane experience overall (roughly 4:1 ratio of traditional marksmen to mages), even though for some traditional marksmen, they can be quite frustrating - it's important that players experience a mix of games at high intensity (eg. Playing adc against rengar/talon + mages bot) and also games that are more comfortable and low threat (maybe ivern jungle) as it creates the variety and flow state that keeps the game fun - too much intensity or too little intensity would make the game unfun in the long run as you'd never really feel those spikes of cortisol and triumph (which is one of the reasons assassins need to be strong for example) or be constantly stressed - marksmen are still the most popular bot carry in both pro and regular play - mages bot also need to be viable picks to allow teams to undoom themselves in champ select for an ad mid pick like zed/yone/Yasuo - that said, mages bot have pretty high winrates (often the highest), so aren't they overpowered? - The winrates don't really tell the full story, but they are definitely strong for several reasons. Mages, especially simple ones like brand, veigar or Swain for example have quite shallow mastery curves (usually only gaining 3-4% after playing ~50 games and also starting very high on game 1) in addition to not being deeply played in bot lane (ie. many mage bot players haven't progressed the mastery curve that far when you encounter them AND the mastery curve is not that steep) -> a similar effect to if you played autofilled malphite top (high skill floor) - adcs by contrast are typically harder to play but also reward that mastery depth more, meaning their winrates are relatively suppressed compared to mages bot - I'm not saying that mages at high levels of mastery/skill are weak (see them in pro play or high elo ranked), but mainly saying that winrates don't tell the full story and we see them as relatively similar in power level overall, just often more forgiving and can be more tolerant of matchup - adcs also have accelerated 3 item spikes in this season (compared to the other roles) due to bot quest, which also presents an interesting strategic balancing point (the mages a bit stronger on early item spikes and weaker on later ones) - another balancing aspect of mages bot is that they typically represent a composition tradeoff. Eg. ori + yunara/lulu bot lane and win on 2/3 items or AD mid plus ziggs+engage bot and need to end the game fast - if struggling with mages bot, champs like ezreal/sivir/zeri can be quite effective against them (dodge skills and have strong 2/3 item spikes and out scale) - anyway, a nuanced conversation that I'll dig into more in a video later Azir - players have been complaining about a bunch of bugged functionality for Azir ever since we made the changes to make on hits work on him - the team has fixed the vast majority of these bugs, eg. Things like jungle monsters not getting shuffled, pta not working, conq stacks, etc. - thanks to all your bug reports in helping track these down and keep them coming! Proto Harness - when looking at our jungle nasus nerfs, we ended up deciding that a better nerf would be to target proto harness - other users like shen jungle are also pretty strong, so we think pulling the champ nerfs and nerfing the item instead is a better direction and helps retain the power level of top nasus for example The other changes in this patch are relatively straightforward, but lmk if there's any more detail wanted and I can cover them in the rundown next week

Seraphine nerf: - Q AP ratio reduced from 50% to 40%

Senna nerfs: - Crit damage reduced from 85% to 80% - Q heal AP ratio reduced from 50% to 30% - Q slow AP ratio reduced from 10% per 100 AP to 5%

Senna nerfs: - Crit damage reduced from 85% to 80% - Q heal AP ratio reduced from 50% to 30% - Q slow AP ratio reduced from 10% per 100 AP to 5%

Seraphine nerf: - Q AP ratio reduced from 50% to 40%