Briar entered League of Legends with a bang. First, she was a horrible pick barely scraping by, now she’s breaking the 51 percent win rate threshold, and in a couple of days, she’ll be getting her first nerf.
On Sept. 21, lead champion designer August “Riot August” Browning announced that the first-ever Briar nerfs will focus on trimming down her healing power, namely against monsters and minions.
Ever since she got a small buff on Sept. 14, Briar has been terrorizing solo queue in both normal and high MMR with a 51 percent win rate.
The aforementioned nerf will go out with Patch 13.19, and will lower her attack speed growth per level is getting reduced from 2.5 to only 2.3 percent.
But, that’s not all because her W ability Blood Frenzy / Snack Attack is getting hit the most with devs trimming down increased damage versus minions and monsters from 20 percent to 10 percent. Executing this ability will do only 400 damage now, and healing will go down from 35-65 to 36-60 percent.
Overall, this is quite a harsh nerf, especially when compared to the buff given to her only days after the release.
“The buff was pretty small though and just to encourage more play rate. This nerf is much larger than the buff. It wasn’t that bad,” League analyst Molecule explained.
If you ask me, Briar was yet another case where Riot rushed with hotfix buffs, not giving players an opportunity to learn her. So, what was supposed to be a small hotfix that would nudge her in the right direction, turned out to be an entirely unnecessary buff that now needs fixing.
One day, Riot will learn there’s no need for panic buffs and that newer champions, especially with overloaded kits, take time to learn.
Published: Sep 22, 2023 09:03 am