Matt Leung-Harrison@RiotPhroxzon
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
