Miss Fortune is rising up through the ADC ranks, and soon, she’ll be at the very top. The only champion standing in her way is Ezreal, and he’s on his way out the door.
Thanks to the power of the Kleptomancy rune, Ezreal has been the king of the bot lane since the beginning of the preseason last month. His winrate peaked at almost 58 percent, with a playrate of almost 30 percent to boot, according to League of Legends stats site OP.gg. That made him the most popular and best performing champion in the game by a long shot.
His early damage combined with the perfect synergy between Klepto and his Q, Mystic Shot, turned him into quite the monster. He has respectable damage at all points of the game, and he scales almost unreasonably well the longer a game is drawn out, not to mention his innate mobility. You may have played against him during the past few weeks and wondered to yourself, “How could Riot have allowed this to happen?” Well, it wasn’t really a mistake to begin with.
Ezreal was extremely weak earlier this year, and his Q’s AD scaling was buffed from 110 percent to 125 percent to help him out. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough on its own to make him a respectable bot laner. He could jungle, but he couldn’t keep up with an enemy ADC in lane. No one expected Kleptomancy would make him so powerful, though. When the runes launched, Klepto worked with the Q buff from Patch 7.17 to tip him over the edge into the realm of OP.
Well, he was OP, anyway.
Patch 7.24 was pushed onto live servers today, and it brought an Ezreal nerf along with it. The nerf simply reverted the buff from Patch 7.17, as he clearly doesn’t need it anymore with power he’s gained from the new runes. Unfortunately, that opened up the door for the second most-OP ADC on the market—Miss Fortune.
She’s been catching up to Ezreal in terms of performance, sitting at a 55 percent winrate and 15 percent playrate, according to OP.gg—and after today’s patch, she may very well surpass him. Miss Fortune, akin to Ezreal, has the new rune system to thank for her newfound strength.
By taking the Sorcery rune path, she gains 15 AD, which is significant. Unlike most ADCs, she didn’t rely as much on attack speed runes, so she didn’t lose much when they went away, and she was just given flat damage to compensate. That’s a great trade for a bursting and poking ADC. Keystone runes like Summon Aery and Arcane Comet add onto her incomparable poke and single-ability burst, and she has less mana problems thanks to Manaflow Band. The runes have worked out very well in her favor.
It’s possible that the nerf to Ezreal won’t be enough to bring him all the way back down to earth, but it should be just enough to give Miss Fortune the window she needs to climb past him.
