Some of League of Legends’ hardest hitting top laners are getting slapped with a ton of changes in tomorrow’s patch, according to the official patch notes.
The top lane currently has one of the most diverse metas in the game. You can get away with playing high damage, splitpushers, tanks, and support-style tanks without being at much of a disadvantage at all. You can actually choose your champion to counter the opponent, rather than just picking the flavor of the month, for the first time all year in the top lane. That is, except for a couple of champions. There are still some that are so powerful, you can pretty much play them in any situation. Not only that, but there are also some particularly weak champions. Because of that, change is on the way.
Gnar
The little Yordle may be League’s equivalent to the Incredible Hulk, but he’s still considerably weaker than most other top lane champions in the game currently. He dominated the meta for a while, or at least was a viable contender, but this season has been particularly rough for him. He’s supposed to be one of the game’s best lane bullies, but even tanks are able to out-harass him in lane nowadays.
His Q is going to deal a lot more damage at higher ranks, which is a big deal, because his Q is almost always maxed before you even start thinking of leaving your lane as Gnar. This will help him trade damage in lane enough to stay relevant into the late game. Speaking of the late game, his teamfight presence is much more significant now with a big range increase coming to his Mega Crunch.
Galio
Galio has the opposite problem. He’s way too damn powerful, and he needs some tweaks. He harasses in lane like a mage, or at least a mage bruiser like Rumble, while maintaining enough tankiness to outlast the beefiest of League’s meatshields. His tankiness is being brought down a bit, but his damage is being increased.
His base armor and the base damage on his Q is being lowered by a good amount, but the AP scaling on his Q is being raised by a big chunk. AP tank items like the Abyssal Mask, Zhonya’s Hourglass, and Rylai’s will be more effective on him now. Players might not alter his build at all, but we may start seeing him built a little bit more like Rumble.
Kennen
One of Kennen’s appeals is that he can be built with AD or AP depending on what the situation calls for. He definitely needs nerfs due to how dominant his AD build is, but it’s always tricky to do without making one build more useless than the next. Riot seems to have found a decent balance.
His W will now scale with bonus AD instead of total AD, and it will be getting a small AP scaling. That way, it will be more useful the more AD you build, but the ability won’t be useless now if you build AP. The AP scaling on his E is being increased to make AP Kennen a little more appealing than it is now, as it’s being greatly outshined by AD Kennen at the moment.
Poppy and Maokai
We’re looping Maokai and Poppy together because their buffs aren’t terribly big, but they’re big enough to help the tanks out when they’re tangoing with the current meta.
Poppy’s Q will deal more maximum health damage on both the initial impact and the explosion, and Maokai’s ultimate range is now longer, and it’s on a shorter cooldown. Poppy has had trouble trading damage with current top laners since the start of the season, so this buff should help her out. Maokai’s ultimate moves so slowly that its massive cooldown and relatively small range were totally unnecessary, so it definitely needed these buffs.
