Sejuani spent a few months last year at the tippy top of the jungle meta in League of Legends. It’d be rare to see a pro game without her either locked in or banned, and she had a stranglehold on the solo queue meta, too.
Since the end of summer last year, though, she’s been on the decline. Other tanks started to pass her as the best beefcakes in the game, and eventually we arrived at the current meta, where’s she’s mostly useless. It’s been a hard fall for Sej, but as of yesterday’s PBE update, it looks like she might finally head back to the top.
This is both good and bad news, depending on your view of Sejuani. When she gets any semblance of power, Sejuani can usually use that small boost to crush her competition in the jungle. So, if you weren’t a fan of her before, this might suck to read. On the flip side, duelists and high-damage junglers are taking over the meta at the moment—those that can put up a good fight around the highly-coveted Scuttle Crabs.
Sejuani being strong means that there would be a tank mixed into that new duelist meta, which means her team would have more opportunities for support-style playmaking and peel for the ADC. So, if you’re an ADC or a mid laner that’s sick of running control mages to help out the damage jungler, you might like the change of pace that Sejuani offers.
Her upcoming buffs primarily help her camp clear, but they help so much that she’ll have a lot more time for ganking, which is a big weakness of hers at the moment. The change in question comes for her Permafrost, which is her E. The ability’s usual 10-second lockout has been removed, but only when hitting large minions and monsters. Her Fury of the North passive ability that triggers when she hits a Permafrosted enemy deals a ton of damage to monsters, so this is a huge help.
Riot is even nerfing Fury of the North’s damage to sort of slow down her camp clear a little bit, but the buff to Permafrost is too big for that to matter much at all. Her W, Winter’s Wrath, is now getting two AP scalings—one for the swing and another, larger one for the lash. This is a big damage buff, especially when considering she maxes this ability out first in almost every game, and it comes at the cost of nothing. The AP scaling and flat damage of her Permafrost are also going way up, which will help her deal noticeably more damage during ganks.
These buffs are so big that we’re half expecting them to be dialed back a bit before going live in Patch 8.12, but you never know. If they do go live in 8.12, that means she’ll receive them in about two weeks.
