Game designer Azubuike “AzuBK” Ndefo-Dahl has revealed that Riot Games is sending a fresh new rework for League of Legends‘ very own clown, Shaco. The Demon Jester’s kit hasn’t been touched for many years now, so these new changes should be good for anyone who wants to try him out in the jungle.
AzuBK says that the goal for this rework is to shift some power back into Shaco’s early game, while also reducing his late-game Lethality one-shot potential. AD and AP Shaco builds should also get equal consideration from players, because those stats affect different parts of his kit. Check out all the details below:
Most of Shaco’s abilities have remained relatively similar to before, but they all have been adjusted significantly. For example, his basic attack, Q and E have different bonus effects when hitting enemies from behind due to his adjusted Backstab passive. Deceive’s stealth duration is being increased in the early levels, but is getting decreased at the later stages of the game. Shaco’s next attack coming out of stealth can now critically strike, but the attack’s AP ratio has been removed.
Jack in the Box, on the other hand, has been adjusted in a big way—boxes now deal area-of-effect damage to targets, and they also fear non-champions for three seconds. Shaco’s E also does magic damage instead of physical, and will now deal 50 percent more damage to targets below 30 percent health. All these changes should help Shaco’s clear speed by a ton, and should make him a menace to deal with in the early game.
Lastly, Shaco’s ultimate will cause boxes to trigger immediately instead of having to wait for an enemy to walk close. The clone explosion damage has been lowered quite a bit, though.
Clearly, some of these numbers are overtuned, but AzuBK says that the team wanted to “get mechanical changes in place, then be able to mostly tune numbers going forward.” If these changes go through, we could see Shaco clowning around in many of our solo queue games once more.
