Everyone takes Teleport. No matter what bot laner you lock in, or if you’ve decided to take Riven or a tank to the top lane, you better love Teleport or you’re not going to have fun in the current meta.
Well, Riot apparently doesn’t like that.
You guessed it, there’s a big Teleport nerf coming, and that means the meta is about to change in a big way. Again. For the hundredth time in two months. Are we having fun yet? No? GOOD.
The nerf is quite a heavy-handed one, raising the Summoner Spell’s cooldown by one whole minute from 300 seconds to 360 seconds. On top of that, cancelling it early will no longer refund part of the cooldown. It seems a bit extreme to raise the cooldown by an entire minute on top of gutting the cooldown reduction when canceled, so we wouldn’t be surprised if Riot decided to revert or dampen the impact of this nerf before it goes live in about two weeks.
We do actually believe that a Teleport nerf needs to happen. There shouldn’t ever be an instance where one Summoner Spell runs the show in multiple roles. We already have to deal with Flash doing just that, and if we had two of them, there wouldn’t really be a point in having more than two Summoner Spells to begin with.
That being said, this still seems like a bit much. Drastic, heavy-handed balance changes seem to be why the meta has been so volatile for the past six months or so. This being another drastic, heavy-handed balance change, may have rippling effects on the rest of the meta despite only being aimed at one spell.
For instance, many of the few remaining marksmen in the meta rely on Teleport to return to lane fast enough to compete with early game bullies in the bot lane. Essentially knocking Teleport out of the running means that they might be hurt even more than they have already been. And then there’s also the possibility that champions who excel without Teleport will take over the meta in the top lane—high damage fighters, bruisers, and assassins who can run Ignite.
If this nerf makes it through the PBE, it’ll release with Patch 8.14 on Wednesday, July 18.
