League of Legends junglers beware: You may have to learn two more champions soon. But at least you’ll have to deal with one less dragon.
A year after Aurelion Sol was released, the dragon’s long-awaited update has been pushed back until Riot can find the time to work on a larger scale update, according to a recent dev post by Andrei “Meddler” van Roon, Riot’s core gameplay lead designer.
Aurelion Sol is in desperate need of changes after Riot reduced the damage to his W in September 2016 with Patch 6.19. The original idea was to give Aurelion Sol a Shyvana-like scope update, and make one or two spells more satisfying to use.
“After testing a few different directions we concluded that a mini update on Aurelion Sol wasn’t something we thought we should do,” Meddler said in the dev post.
Riot tested balance changes to Aurelion Sol, but felt the time it was investing into the champion could be spent elsewhere—like on improving the game or champions that require less time to update.
The prospective changes “didn’t work out as well as [Riot] hoped in game,” Meddler said. Riot is trying to implement changes that will appeal towards Aurelion Sol mains. The company doesn’t want to discourage players from trying him out in the future, however, and is also looking to develop changes to make him more accessible.
It’s not all doom and gloom though. Meddler confirmed in the post that Aatrox and Udyr will see some changes to make them more viable in the jungle.
Aatrox will be given a further followup to his major changes in Patch 7.5, with Riot giving him the chance to be a jungler. The developer is mainly looking at passive changes, to counteract the health issues he faces against jungle creeps.
Aatrox is predominantly a champion favored in the top lane, and doesn’t see jungle play often. If a player wants to take some jungle creeps to stay relevant in lane, however, they can sometimes struggle in the early game if they are behind in the match-up.
For Udyr, Riot is changing his Q ability, Tiger Stance, which currently gives the player bonus attack speed for five seconds. The aim of the change is to make it more viable in the build path.
Most players buy attack speed items to compensate for not taking Udyr’s Q, favoring his E and R abilities instead—to make him quicker in lane (E), while attacking enemies in a radius around him while chasing them down (R).
Riot is hoping the changes will be ready by Patch 7.8, and is targeting a release on the PBE early next week.
