The next League of Legends update, Patch 8.24b, is going to be entirely made up of balance changes rather than new features, champions, or skins. Yesterday’s update to the PBE revealed where a significant portion of those balance changes will be targeted—the bot lane.
In the update, big changes were revealed for a few marksman champions, including Xayah, Ashe, and Sivir, as well as Hail of Blades, which hasn’t exactly hit the mark since its release in Patch 8.11 this year. In fact, the only champion it’s seen mainstream popularity on is Jhin, with players picking it up here and there on others. But even Jhin is leaning more toward Fleet Footwork and Dark Harvest nowadays.
Hail of Blades currently scales up with level, providing lower attack speed at the start of the game compared to when you hit its pinnacle. Riot seems to believe that’s where the rune’s core issues lie, probably because champions benefit the least from attack speed early on in the game. After this patch goes live, assuming the change makes it through testing, Hail of Blades will no longer scale. Rather than start at a 75 percent attack speed boost, scaling to 125 percent, it’ll now remain at a constant 110 percent throughout the entire game.
Alongside that change, Sivir’s set is definitely the most significant of the marksman changes so far. Her Q, W, and R are all getting changed, resulting in mostly a buff to her kit. Her R’s passive attack speed is being changed from a scaling 30 to 60 percent to a flat 45 percent, which is mostly just a tweak. Her W, on the other hand, is getting buffed to scale higher with her AD. Her Q’s buff slides under the radar a bit, but it’s very significant, too.
The tooltip for her Q, Boomerang Blade, now states that it deals less damage to each subsequent non-champion it passes through. In the game right now, it merely deals less damage to all subsequent targets, meaning champions will no longer be affected by that feature of the Q. In other words, she’s going to get a lot more mileage out of it in late-game teamfights if she can run it through multiple champions.
Xayah’s change is an interesting one, because it’s not really a flat buff or nerf. The AD scaling and base damage on her E, Bladecaller, are going up by a pretty hefty amount, but the ability will no longer scale with crit chance. This takes away her reliance on crit and boosts her baseline effectiveness, but we’re not sure if it comes out as an overall nerf or buff just yet. If anything, it definitely opens her up to different builds.
And finally, Ashe is receiving the smallest change of the buff. Now, if she spots an unseen enemy with her Hawkshot and they then are killed by Ashe’s allies, Ashe will receive an assist. Again, this doesn’t occur if the enemy was already in vision when the Hawkshot hit them, Not a big change, surely, but it’s technically still a buff.
All of these changes should arrive with 8.24b next week.
