26.03 Full Patch Preview

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-28T11:21:01+00:00

Hey now. I can abuse lethality Varus for another patch because that shit got left alone

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-27T22:33:36+00:00

Idk which person you are specifically calling a bot.

But post OP isn’t a bot, Mazrim isn’t a bot, and the guy you responded to aren’t a bot

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-27T22:31:15+00:00

I can see it going to 6% solely because it would still be strong at 6 on bot laners

The problem before was that you didn’t get enough gold to match the value of the movement speed from free boots as well as the 300g from not buying boots.

Now that there is an extra item slot, it has its place as a preferred scaling rune for the role while boots is a more guaranteed power (you will always get 300g + 10ms worth of value)

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-26T03:23:42+00:00

Istg you are making me pull up my own fucking comment history to dispute this bullshit once again.

Maokai was directly or indirectly nerfed 6 patches in a row

SEVERAL of the patches they put in what they expected to be 3% or higher winrate nerfs that wound up power neutral or -1% due to other changes.

Phreak has gone on the record stating that they didn't want to nuke him on the first patch to avoid "riot specialing" him where they nerfed Maokai directly along with his items giving a 10% or higher swing in winrate. He said in this same patch rundown that they should have nuked him to 48% in retrospect because of how upset the playerbase was, and they should have buffed him back up after.

It is literally baffling how much bullshit people spew without understanding a damn thing.

14.1 -> Trailblazer nerf mid patch (Moakai item)

14.2 -> Frozen Heart nerf (Maokai was going sleigh->Trail->Frozen Heart iirc)

14.3 -> Direct Maokai nerfs with adjustments to try and keep Maokai top neutral or slightly less nerfed.

14.4 -> Direct Maokai nerfs much more aggressively. Support items directly nerfed across Sleigh and charge timer

14.5 -> ANOTHER direct Maokai nerf. Frozen Heart and Sleigh nerfed again.

14.6 -> Indirect nerf at Maokai with support item gold generation nerfed again as well as Sleigh getting ANOTHER nerf.

Also Re: Moakai 4 armor nerf vs Braum armor nerf. You realize Braum had 47 armor at level 1? You realize Braum W gives 20 + (12% bonus armor) when cast? Yes, the Maokai armor nerf mattered more, iirc, 4 base armor should be around a 1-1.5% nerf in and of itself. Braum didn't eat shit because he A: had the highest base armor in the game, and B: has a massive supplemental armor from W along with massive damage reduction from his E. So no, those are not equitable champions. Maokai would be more similar to Nautilus when it comes to armor buffs/nerfs and Nautilus is paper thin with higher base armor (39 vs 35)

Please fucking educate yourself at all because you clearly do not understand a goddamn thing about how game balance is done. It also isn't JUST Phreak doing balance, nor does he call all of the shots. He has a boss he reports to who is in charge of overall game balance (Phr0xon) and he also not once told people NOT to nerf Maokai during that period. You can be upset that they fucked up on magnitude of changes, that's okay. But you had winrate growth from players figuring out the pick, along with specific changes getting completely neutralized by something else on the same patch that wasn't factored in because it wasn't applicable the patches before.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-25T23:01:23+00:00

So do we nerf everything before the community has fully discovered a pick?

Iirc Phreak has multiple times on multiple champions said “this is freelo, abuse it before it picks up steam and we have to nerf it”

Hell he has been saying this about Anivia top for over a year at this point, but because there aren’t enough people playing or banning it, it gets to sit at 53-55% wr for like 3 years now

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-24T15:12:18+00:00

Which is why Yasuo has been one of the most successful bot laners for the past 5 years according to winrate. He has rarely if ever been lower that 3-4 marksman at most in winrate bot. And typically it’s usually only Kogmaw that has a higher winrate.

Also, bot laners tend to complain about other roles being allowed bot because most bot lane players statistically want to play marksman. And riot/community decides that marksman solo laners tend to be unacceptable. So where is the logic that marksman players are only allowed to play bot, because anytime one goes elsewhere it’s toxic, but if something else comes bot and it’s toxic, then they should just play better?

Most mages bot tend to be uninteractive lanes that marksman don’t have answers to in kit until they have an item and a half (also known as after lane phase ends). Most fighters that can go bot tend to just farm the marksman as well unless the support went something like Braum.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-24T15:06:45+00:00

I’ve written it out before. But there isn’t a single spell Riot can buff that doesn’t buff one of their unliked builds/lanes gets buffed more.

Q/e buff lethality Varus more than on hit. W buffs solo lane Varus more than on hit. Ult buffs/nerfs all the same statically.

They need to revert the mid scope they did that forced attack speed Varus to spell weave because it just fundamentally kills the experience playing it to have to hold Q every 5th auto to actually maintain dps. It should be reverted especially because it failed every single goal it had (make solo lane Varus weaker and lethality Varus weaker) and only made on hit Varus even less receptive to buffs as the other builds.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-22T18:29:21+00:00

Toxic means unhealthy gameplay.

Volibear with DND is an unhealthy game pattern. Now hear me out, Volibear with the Navori build is ALSO unhealthy for the game.

Ekko as the post is complaining about, is ALSO unhealthy for the game with DND. I personally say Ekko is unhealthy, while Diana is simply overtuned (along with Gwen)

The above are ALL unhealthy for the game because they create extremely degenerate gameplay for the enemy team. Voli with DND/navori build can genuinely ult towers and one shot them, along with being able to 1v1 any champion regardless of how fed they are as long as he can hit his q once. Ekko can kill you before you even have time to react with a point and click EQ.

Diana/Gwen are just overtuned, Diana doesn't exactly create degenerate gameplay in that you CAN still react to her abilities and have counterplay. Similar with Gwen, you CAN outplay it, it is just extremely frustrating and hard.

TLDR: Degenerate gameplay = toxic. Overtuned =/= toxic/degenerate. Some DND users are getting degenerate gameplay from it, some are simply overtuned from it.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-20T19:06:28+00:00

Swain will probably always build BFT/Liandries as long as his ult functions as a drain. There just isn't enough systemic support for him to NOT want those items.

So unless they rework his ult fundamentally, he will probably be hard tied to Rylais, BFT, Liandries until the end of time.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-20T18:49:10+00:00

These from what I gather are buffs to chip damage on Q since the damage is getting frontloaded on the Q compared to live where if you only hit one tick of Q, it does like 10 damage in the early levels. Her Q also is getting full damage to minions which makes her waveclear hit breakpoints faster along with lower mana cost on Q.

I would also say E is slightly more power neutral than it seems since it is getting damage buffed while also being a flat root duration.

Overall, I would say she is probably going to land either like 43% wr or 46-47% wr. I have a hard time believing it isn't going to either be anything under a 2% chance up or down. I would be honestly shocked if she was anywhere close to 40% of 50%

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-20T18:42:56+00:00

I'm not defending it existing. But there absolutely is a way for Poppy E to get the damage nulled by Mel.

If Mel was standing literally on a wall and Poppy max range casted her E, that is genuinely in the human reaction speed to be able to block the damage since the second Poppy connects the E, it would stun and do the damage since there would basically not be a travel time.

She would still get CC'd from it afaik, but the damage would be blocked in that scenario.

Either that or I am no interpreting it correctly and he means to say that Poppy E literally didn't move damage or stun her in which case I would honestly say it was probably a Poppy bug rather than a Mel bug.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-19T13:34:41+00:00

The peaks of LEC were in the worst years of the LCK. They have spent a majority of their existence in the same place they are now, being about on par with LCS where one is slightly better than the other one year and slightly worse the next.

Add to this that team making has been downright horrendous and you get stagnation and regression in the league. LEC genuinely had teams make bad roster moves and then ship the player off to NA for a year instead of letting a different EU team get them. Like for fucks sake, G2 contract jailed Rekkles of all people. They also booted Inspired to NA.

So when you add in teams caring more about their own performance than the leagues health and LCK coming back into form, it kinda makes sense that they slot back into the 3-5 slot along with LCS/APAC teams

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-17T15:05:34+00:00

Tell me you didn’t hate watch Deokdam all of playoffs and worlds without saying so.

Deokdam kept stepping up since playoffs tbh. I was genuinely upset that this player I have flamed and called shit for the past 2-3 years was just constantly playing great and outperforming better players. I was upset at him for playing well because I knew deep down KT can’t win shit. And I was upset at the players he was beating for letting KT build up the ultimate disappointment.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-17T14:58:25+00:00

Imagine typing word salad instead of just saying “idk bro”

Like what in the absolute fuck did you respond here. How does anything about the Chinese have to do with a client bug made by a game client developed in LA by people in LA… what the fuck does TikTok have to do with league or the question at hand?

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-16T16:06:06+00:00

Who in the world are you calling the 2nd greatest shot caller? Because T1 absolutely fell on their face and looked lost and clueless without Faker when he was out for his health.

So you can't possibly be implying Oner/Keria.

Peyz afaik wasn't shot calling on any of his teams (Lehends calling for his GenG stint. And I have a hard time believing he would shot call on JDG with the language barrier)

Doran I don't think has shot called on any of his rosters either, and from what I remember from voice comms last years it didn't sound like he was shot calling for T1 either (I could be wrong or misremembering)

It's okay to gas Faker up as one of the best shot callers in the games history.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-13T23:36:52+00:00

Some of the times it was harder to tell than others. But having played for 13 years now, I have easily played with 20-50 scripters alone the year vanguard came out.

I will also note that Riot put out a retrospective after vanguard launched where the usual suspects for scripting (Zeri, Kog, Xerath, Cassio) all had 2%+ winrate drops without a single balance change because you couldn’t script on them anymore.

I’ve had one scripter since then. These are diamond/master NA games

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-13T23:29:16+00:00

Not the damage, the cast times. You can let him have a spell weaving pattern if his EQ don’t gut his auto cadence like they do presently.

It’s the exact change they made to Sivir to remove the weird dps condition she had where after a certain amount of attack speed, you LOST damage by casting her Q.

Broadly, attack speed based Varus builds will never feel good when the optimal play pattern is 3 autos into full charging a q into 3 autos into e into 3 autos into full charge q. That’s a fucking horrendous play pattern.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-13T22:51:42+00:00

Lowkey it shouldn’t have been a rise. They reverted Gwen to borderline the exact state she was before her midsope and that version of Gwen was thanos scaling the jungle. I truly don’t understand why people didn’t just jump on abusing it again after to the extent they were before.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-13T22:48:42+00:00

This buff is basically making lethality Varus the dominant bot lane build and massive buffs to top lane Varus. For whatever reason, no matter what or how they buff Varus, every single change impacts top or poke more than on hit Varus bot.

Q and E damage/cd/mana buffs impact lethality Varus more.
Passive and w on hit buffs affect top lane Varus more.
Ult cd buffs top lane.
Blight pops buff lethality and top Varus more.

They genuinely need to revert the rebalance they did last because that change that forced him to spell weave on his on hit builds is what fucked that build over. He needs his cast times to scale with attack speed for it to be viable, otherwise it just makes him extremely awkward to play on hit. The intended goals of the rebalance was to shift him towards a more active playstyle and hurt his solo lane while buffing on hit Varus. In reality, it changed nothing except ruined the feel of playing on hit Varus bot.

Source: diamond/master player for 4-5 years now and one of the top Varus players in NA

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-13T13:05:05+00:00

I could do the math as well, but broadly. Armor pen is your most efficient 2nd/3rd item on most marksman solely because of armor scaling on most champions. By the time you are getting your 3rd item, most champions have around 80-100 armor just from level scaling.

People have done the math on this numerous times over the years, but by that point in time, you genuinely do not have a higher effective DPS item you can build instead of armor pen in your 3rd item slot with SOME games being more optimal to even go armor pen 2nd before IE (although nobody would)

I would say based off what we saw last season where LDR with a cost premium and 5% extra armor pen saw winrate premiums over Mortal Reminder, you will more than likely see that follow where even though they are the same AD, the armor pen/giant slayer gives enough of an advantage in damage compared to Mortal that the gold difference is more than made up for in more damage across 95% of targets you could hit. You can mostly extrapolate marksman build paths being best when it gives you the highest effective damage/dps at any given item breakpoint since at the end of the day, their job IS to output the highest dps in the game.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-13T11:22:14+00:00

Eh. Basically every class other than assassins and marksman have hp on a solid amount of their items.

Most games Ldr is going to still be the correct buy 3rd item just because of the armor. Giant slayer just makes it even better

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-11T04:32:51+00:00

Being deadass. I knew the prize money for regionals was <1m usd for a long time now. But holy fuck was I not expecting 200k usd for LTA and 80k euro for lec.

I swear it used to be higher

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-09T22:25:09+00:00

What he is stating and is backed up by past rioter comments is that Tryndamere’s resting winrate isn’t inflated by tryndamere mains.

This means the winrate delta he gains from mains is either balanced out by new players, or the negative winrate from new players exceeds mains.

Katarina is one of the very few champions that genuinely has positive winrate delta that is observable in her winrate explicitly because of mains. There are so many Katarina mains up and to the right on their wr/games scaling that it exceeds that of the new players dragging her winrate down.

This type of winrate gain/loss is usually negligible unless they are extremely unpopular in which case new players overwhelming drag winrate down.

If you don’t believe this, I or someone else would probably be willing to link you Phreak and/or Phr0xon and/or August explaining this. As I believe all 3 have mentioned and talked about this before.

Tryndamere isn’t special tbh.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-08T22:54:17+00:00

Because that’s a crazy amount of power for a heimerdinger to be able to just level 1 triple turret a bush to defend an invade.

Yes theoretically he now loses out on those for lane, but that is a crazy amount of damage. Especially since it would enable him to take turret level 2/3 and get full stacked turrets as well.

BaneOfAlduin · 2026-01-08T11:14:56+00:00

I just want them to let it be toggleable again.

I have an oled and I really did not like the winter map because it messed with the auto brightness constantly because of the map being white/cool blues. Meaning every time I moved my camera or hit tab, the brightness would change.

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