Lee Sin and Graves are played far too often, and if things don’t improve for them soon, Riot is threatening to nerf the jungle champions, the developer said in a comment on a League of Legends forum post.
The two junglers collectively are played in 55 percent of ranked games, according to Champion.gg, a League statistics website. That’s definitely a staggering number, but it doesn’t mean they necessarily need nerfs—at least not both of them. Graves’ individual play-rate is only at 15 percent, which is still sort of high, but it isn’t anything out of the ordinary for a strong meta pick. For instance, both Elise and Kha’zix are sitting at 14 and 13 percent respectively, which isn’t very far off. His win-rate is an abysmal 47 percent as well, which is far from too high.
Lee Sin, on the other hand, seems a bit unbalanced. His play-rate alone is over 40 percent, which is more than double the second most played jungler, Graves. With huge changes coming to the three tank junglers and items that will help tanks reach a much stronger place in the game, it would be silly to try to nerf Lee before this big update. That’s why Riot will be waiting to see how the patch affects him. If they nerfed him beforehand, only to discover that the Midseason update was enough to knock him down a few pegs, he might need a buff.
After the update, however, if Lee’s play-rate remains this high without his win-rate falling as a result, he’ll need a nerf. Raising the cooldown on his Q to make it more punishing to miss would be a good option, as well as taking some power away from his E, at least in the early stages of the game. Hopefully the tank update brings enough balance to the Rift that he won’t need it, however.
