The mid-season patches may be behind us in League of Legends, but that doesn’t mean the heavy-hitting balance changes aren’t sticking around. On yesterday’s PBE update, everyone’s favorite trickster, Fizz, got a semi-new ability.
The new ability replaces his W, Seastone Trident, which used to passively deal damage over time and apply a mark that would allow him to boost his damage when activating the ability. The entire mark system of the ability is being replaced, but its passive DoT is remaining for the most part.
There are three things that are being completely removed from the ability, one big new feature, and then some tweaks to round the change out. First, the ability’s mark and all of its traits are gone. That means the mark itself and the W’s active dealing triple damage on a fully-marked target. The third removal comes for the ability’s cooldown reduction when killing a unit with the W’s active.
To replace all of those, the W’s active is simply getting a second cast that can be used after a one-second lockout from the first cast. As simple as that sounds, it has some unique characteristics. For starters, if Chum the Waters is active on a target, he doesn’t have to wait until the end of the lockout to use the second cast.
More importantly, though, is the second cast’s practicality for fights not involving his ultimate. The second cast deals significantly more flat damage than the first case, and it scales higher with AP. The second cast also deals more damage to low health targets, making it an execute ability, going all the way up to 100 percent more damage if the target’s health is low enough. That’s absolutely insane, and it means that it’ll be hard to prevent death if Fizz finds you running low on health.
As a minor tweak, Seastone Trident’s mana refund has also been lowered by about half at each rank of the ability.
So, what do these big changes mean? Well, for starters, Fizz is going to be a lot worse at farming and clearing his lane minions. Without the huge boost to the ability’s cooldown reduction when he kills a minion with it, he suddenly has fewer tools to push waves. Fortunately, Fizz has never really been known for clearing waves, and in our opinion, that feature felt a little forced into his kit to begin with.
Fizz has more to look forward to, which should make up for the fact that he can’t push as fast or as safely. Now, he’s going to deal a lot more burst damage, and that’s what Fizz has always been known for. He now has a reliable, and very large up-front execute ability, and even when the target isn’t low on health, it still gives him much more damage at the start of a fight.
With the old mark system, his burst would be stretched out and held behind a time wall. Now that he doesn’t have to wait for the mark to complete, he’s free to burst more frequently.
This change won’t be arriving in Patch 8.13, according to Riot’s post on the official League forums, but we expect it won’t be too long after that.
