Patch 25.11 Preview!
The game is feeling decently balanced for most levels right now; a lot of the things that remain are larger structural issues with certain systems, etc. that aren't resolvable in small balance changes.
Mage Items
- Mage items overall have landed in a decent spot, but Horizon Focus is clearly too weak; there's been a bunch of shakeups to the DoT paths (Liandrys paths) and burst paths (Ludens builds are such are certainly more viable)
Cho'Gath
- Cho’s buffed overswung a tad but his skew is about right; looking to keep the skew but take his power down a little
Smolder
- Smolder's buff also overswung a tad, so we're pulling that one back a bit too
Steady State Balance
- We feel our balance is in a pretty good steady state right now, and don't really want to net nerf or buff champions unneccesarily
- As a result we're doing some power neutral changes to relatively champions like Kassadin, Samira for their mastery curves to make them feel more powerful without giving them more power. (eg. Samira being better at snowballing or teamfighting with a power neutral change or Kassadin being slightly more functional in the early game so he can get to late game a bit more reliably)
Aatrox
- Making Aatrox feel better about traditional fighter items by making his W physical damage
- Also making Aatrox a bit more rewarded for hitting sweet spots relatively
Garen
- Adjusting Garen's builds to feel better about non-crit builds and feel better about fighter items
- Part of this is also to make it so that Garen has a bit more repeatability in his pattern through lower E cooldown and by extension enable non-burst patterns more
- Trying to avoid cooldown going too low so that there are still windows to play against him