Pyke has caused plenty of problems in the League of Legends meta over the last few months, and players may be happy to hear he might get a massive nerf in the next patch, according to the latest PBE update. For a while, he ran the show in the pro meta, and more recently, he dominates solo queue.
That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but he’s also extremely frustrating to play against, and one of the big reasons he’s such a menace is one of his popular item builds. You see, Pyke is an AD assassin support, and he’s meant to build high damage and be a little squishy. Despite that design goal, players figured out pretty quickly that they can build nearly pure defensive resistances with his items.
He still deals high raw damage, maintains extreme utility with his abilities, has a resetting execution, and he’s impossibly difficult to kill. And now, Riot wants to tone down the strategy.
The nerf on the PBE isn’t actually a nerf, per se. It’s only a nerf if you want to keep building him as a tank, but it may actually end up being a buff if you like to build him as intended. His passive, Gift of the Drowned Ones, will no longer store grey health based on his level. It will now store health based on his bonus AD. In other words, if you don’t build AD, you’ll be much, much weaker. If you build AD, though, you might feel a lot stronger.
As far as how this will affect Pyke in the meta, it’s hard to tell. Building him as an AD champion is certainly less safe than building him as a tank, but with more power in his sustained grey health, it may make the reward worth the payoff. The change should arrive with Patch 8.21 in two weeks.
Published: Oct 12, 2018 07:18 am