Cho’gath has some upcoming changes on the PBE that are set to arrive in League of Legends Patch 7.14, and so far in testing, they look like they’re going to bring him a ton of power.
He’ll be getting a small bit of buffs to mana costs and damage tweaks on his Feral Scream and Rupture, but the real heavy-hitting change is coming to his Vorpal Spikes.
The change removes the toggle from the ability and turns it into a cooldown while ultimately completely changing its mechanic as well. In the game currently, Cho’s spikes deal a small amount of bonus AoE damage on his auto attacks. The damage really only helps for farming and very early damage trading in lane. The damage is so low that past the first few minutes, it barely affects anything in big fights.
Now, though, after the ability is activated Cho’Gath’s next three auto attacks will deal bonus damage and more damage equal to the target’s maximum health, scaling up with AP and a bonus 0.5 percent more max health with each Feast stack. Let’s put that into perspective.
After all three auto attacks, if Cho has 10 Feast stacks, that’s a grand total of 27 percent of the victim’s max health gone. This is huge, because not only will Cho be able to blow up a carry with an easy ultimate, but he’ll be able to deal a ton of damage to tanks as well. At max rank, this ability will be on a short, four-second cooldown, giving him a ton of reliable, consistent power in longer trades against tanky targets. It also gives him even more power against squishy targets when his ultimate is on cooldown, and that’s a very big deal.
Despite this insane power bump, Cho’Gath is not taking any nerfs in his kit. In fact, he’s only being buffed on his other abilities. When Patch 7.14 hits, don’t be surprised if you see a lot more of him in the top lane and even the jungle. More interestingly, with this new window of damage, it’s possible he’ll make some appearances as mid as the lane’s only tank aside from Galio.
