Riot August revealed that League’s newest champion, Zeri, is set to receive major nerfs to make her abilities and gameplay feel “fair.”
Since her release, Zeri has become a menace both in competitive League and ranked solo queue. On the ranked ladder, Zeri’s win rate progressively goes up the higher rank she is played in, to which her win rate jumps from 51 percent in Silver to nearly 54 percent in higher ELO. Though, with these new impending changes, it looks like Zeri’s power could finally be evened out in this upcoming patch.
Riot developer August Browning revealed on Twitter a list of various nerfs that the Spark of Zaun would receive, with the main goal to lower her overall damage and mobility.
The stats tackle all parts of her kit and she’s set to see a decreased base AD and decreased scaling on her right-click. Zeri’s health and armor will also take hits. Though, through all these nerfs her Q base damage will increase in the next patch to ensure that the nerfs do not completely phase her out of the meta.
Her other abilities will not receive the same love as her E cooldown is being increased to 23 seconds through all levels. This means her late-game presence will not be as effective as before.
The biggest change through all of this has to be the nerfs to her movement speed. Now, Zeri will get fewer movement speed stacks on her ultimate early on, which means she will be more susceptible to early level ganks, an issue many competitive junglers have run into with the new AD carry.
In the LPL, China’s professional League, she has been picked or banned in 98.5 percent of the games since her release. In those 32 games, she still has managed a win rate of 56 percent and has only been counter-picked six percent of the time, meaning if she is open, she is first picked, according to Oracle’s Elixir. Though with the upcoming nerfs, it will be interesting to see if this percentage continues.
With an onslaught of new nerfs, Patch 12.5 may be the last time we see The Spark of Zaun dominate at this level. These nerfs will take place at the release of Patch 12.6, though League’s next patch has been delayed until March 30.
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