Riot is considering changes to Ryze—again

Riot really seem loves to changing Ryze—the Rune Mage just can’t catch a break.

Less than a year after his last rework, Riot is considering further changes to his kit, which it teased in a recent dev post in the League forums.

“[We’re] not sure on Ryze[‘s] direction frankly,” Andrei “Meddler” van Roon, Riot’s core gameplay lead designer, said in the post. “[We] need to put some extended thought into that when time permits.”

Meddler said that Ryze, like Azir, suffers from mana management for large portions of the game. If a Ryze player fails to grab a blue buff in the early game, the player risks becoming irrelevant in the laning phase because Ryze would be unable to cast his spells as often as needed.

Rune Prison currently automatically locks an opponent in place if you use your ability on them. Riot tested changing his W, Rune Prison, into an ability with a travel time (similar to Ryze’s E). Meddler said the team would “like to revisit it as a concept at some point, given how difficult Ryze has been to balance,” but that “it’s not the clear improvement of a change we’d been hoping it was.”

Riot already tested the ability to include some form of travel time between the cast and hitting an opponent. But Riot felt like the changes to the ability had more implications than it was hoping for and chose to revisit the concept in the future.

Giving how difficult Ryze is to balance, Riot said that it was not clear how it would implement new changes in the future and what shape they would take, adding that it didn’t want to give him a larger scale rework. But Riot will definitely to change parts of his kit to help him in the early game and balance him for the future.

Correction 3/31 9:20am CT: Added additional clarification and context on potential changes to Rune Prison.