Matt Leung-Harrison@RiotPhroxzon
Patch 26.11 Preview!
In 26.11, we're making a few adjustments to the Support ecosystem to improve diversity, especially in terms of melee vs ranged balance.
We're also doing some continued followup to champs after some of the Season 2 changes have been optimized.
AP Xin Zhao has popped out as one of the most striking and fun champs, but his healing is a bit on the high side, especially when he's outhealing some of the champs designed around healing.
That said, we still think healing a bunch is exciting and worth supporting, just not at this magnitude.
Systems
- With the role quests in Season Start, ranged supports have risen to the top of the pecking order
- They're both the best at multiplying ADC's who are strong currently, as well as benefiting the most from being in lane for role quests
- Roaming also pays a higher systemic cost as it puts both yourself behind on quest progress and makes it so your ally ADC can't stack their quest
- Overall, this has been desirable, as we think in 2025, roaming was too high for the most part and especially undercut the satisfaction of players in bot lane wanting to a play a “real laning phase”
- At the same time though, we do want to open up a bit of roaming power on the grub timing after early lane is done and so we're buffing up the reward of grubs just slightly
- We're making a broad set of changes to both improve the desirability of some underpurchased items, as well as more finely tune the purpose of various items in the ecosystem
- Other systems adjustments this patch are changes to Experimental Hexplate that aim to make it shine on both melee and ranged users.
- Currently the best users are champs like Nocturne, Olaf, Vayne, Varus and we think we can strike a better balance on more champions while also making the item tradeoffs more apparent for durability vs damage on Vayne and Varus (mostly manifesting in Top)
- The other systems impacting changes are some adjustments to Diana and Ekko jungle who have been slightly worse for wear there (though Mid is mostly fine)
