The League of Legends Patch 26.19 Preview is here. It’s the first of two pre-Worlds patches that will be deployed. Worlds will be played on the next patch, 26.20. Riot Phroxzon on X with the Patch 26.18 Preview.
Role Changes
Support HP Regen
After Support roaming was nerfed in 26.16, pre grub spawn Support roaming is all the way back down again, especially in Pro Play which is what we were after.
That said, Enchanters and Ranged supports are now dominating the meta again.
So we’re making some targeted adjustments to melee supports so that they are able to engage and withstand some poke, rather than get poked out and not be able to engage again.
Overall, this isn’t going to be a giant swing, but hopefully enough of a nudge up for Melee Supports that players think about dynamics of the lane a bit differently.
Top Role Quest
For quite a while now, in some regions, especially at higher skilled play, Top has been a decent amount weaker than Bot (who are the natural counterparts).
That said, Top in regular play is both very popular and very powerful, and we’re not looking to change the dynamic very much (and also why we’re not nerfing bot lane overall).
So we’re giving a targeted adjustment to the more skill skewed aspect of Top lane, through the Teleport and upgraded Teleports from the Role Quest, which are typically used more effective in skilled play (where Top needs the help).
That should allow Top to exert its influence on the map more reliably, especially in split push scenarios.
Ranged Top
We hear a lot of the complaints about Ranged Top laners and agree that when these champs get too powerful it leads to pretty degraded “low gameplay states”. That said we do think it’s reasonable for Ranged Top laners to be a thing you can play there viably, it just needs to be at the appropriate power level with the appropriate power curves.
We don’t feel comfortable taking a large swing here, especially before Worlds, but just wanted to let y’all know that we’re working on some small changes to make it a bit more tolerable for melee champions.
This will hopefully allow us to also buff some of the ranged champions that are normally played bot who were nerfed due to their top lane performance (eg. Vayne), but we won’t be able to do this until this set of systems changes is released.
Class Changes
Simple Champions & Nasus
In the post the other day about simple champions, I mentioned that we think it’s good to have simple champions be strong at all levels of play. Not all of them, but some.
This can often be frustrating, especially when in moment-to-moment combat, their play patterns are very straightforward and feel lower counterplay if they can meet their success condition.
Our philosophy is that if a simple champion is overpowered and causing frustration, then that might be a cause for nerf.
However, if a champion is frustrating and simple, but not overpowered, if it doesn’t have an unintended design flaw, we’re likely to leave it as it is (eg. Viktor).
Viktor is strong in lane, but he’s also easy to gank and weak in early skirmishes; we think this is a reasonable strength and weakness profile and also, over the last few years, we’ve taken (imo) too much power out of early game trading from many champions, which has caused the laning phase to lose texture broadly across the game.
Nasus however, has been strong according to this principle, even when accounting for his mastery curve and he has more sharp success conditions now with Q 4 stacks; in lanes where he can stack freely he becomes more of a threat, while in lanes where he’s contested, he’s easier to keep down.
This often means when you run into Nasus in a good matchup, he’s often scaled without much holistic counterplay for the team (only his lane opponent).
So while we think this shape of Nasus is broadly correct, it does warrant sitting at a slightly lower resting power level due to these considerations.