Patch 26.1
Toplane – 26.1
Crit Champions adjusted
Systems adjusted
New Items !!!
Kayle hot-fix nerfed
Tryndamere hot-fix buffed
Quinn hot-fix buffed
Jax buffed
Hey Friends, best of luck in the new season!
Season 16 is upon us. Let’s quickly cover the system adjustments and what they mean for you without needing to read ~19.000 words from the official patch notes. After, I will present you the new tier lists with a few notes. Keep an eye out for the next blog post that will cover trending builds that you must try out!
First, the quest. From season 16 each role has a quest unique to their respective role. Regarding quest progression, all you need to remember is to play for objectives as you normally would’ve in season 15 (last hits, plates, kills…) and you will be rewarded with quest progress. Keep in mind that you do need to stay within the boundaries of the lane to keep generating passive quest progress.
Toplane quest reward is as follows: Level cap is now 20, flat exp bonus (currently 600), all future exp increased by 12.5% (currently). Also, if you don’t play teleport you will unlock unleashed teleport that has a 7 minute cooldown upon quest completion. If you picked teleport from champ select it will also grant you a 30% max hp shield that lasts 30 seconds.
What are the takeaways? 1. Summoner spell flexibility, 2. Toplane impact stronger than ever, 3. Lane swap detection is gone (finally). There are more takeaways to be mentioned but these are the main ones related to the quest itself. Counterpicking is a lot more impactful and good sidelaning is rewarded more.
Next, we have some notable changes to gold and timers. Baron is back to a 20 minute spawn timer, Atakhan is removed, First blood is 400 gold again and first tower grants +300 gold again. The last two especially will allow toplaners to snowball the laning phase leads more easily.
The game also introduced two new systems – Faelights and Crystalline Overgrowth. Overgrowth is a simple demolish-like system, that stacks crystals on towers over time and allows champions to proc them for a quick burst of damage to the towers. Faelights are a bit more nuanced and complex but all you need to know is that they basically make you ungankable in the early game when you are able to control the river / or have lane priority. They also help quite a bit later on the in the game on sidelane.
Some old systems also got rebalanced, unfortunately – homeguards, game start time and minions. A season one player in me is quite sad about these changes as they make League overall less skillful and more “zoomer-like”, but it is understandable in the context of an aging League player base and the need for fresh recruits to keep the game growing for years to come. TLDR, most important changes are as follows: minions spawn at 30 seconds (no more afk-ing lvl 1), homeguards tempo implications for lane and sidelane, waves spawn more often from 14/25 min marks(30->25->20 sec). Cannon is back to 3rd wave and gives way less gold throughout the game.
So… how are the tier lists looking? Keep in mind that things can quickly shift once teams become more comfortable on the new patch and a new meta game starts to develop, but so far competitive does not look too vastly different compared to season 15, at least in Korea and China. Eu seems to be experimenting a lot more with niche counter picks and with summoner spell choices. Solo Queue on the other hand looks quite amazing.
Since counter picks are much more punishing in season 16, teams and players are defaulting into strong laning phase bruisers – with the highest focus on Rumble and Renekton (Jayce also being quite strong but more so for jungle just like Malphite and Gwen) followed by the safe lane tanks. Flex picks are stronger than ever and a lot of high priority champions are primarily pushed into jungle and midlane while having an option to be taken toplane if the matchup allows it!
Notably, you will notice that Zaahen dropped a bit in priority. His scaling is still amazing, but his weak laning phase is quite painful now that toplane opened up more to the ranged champions that naturally do well into him. Keep an eye out for Gangplank. He might start showing up in pro play if the season 16 changes prove to be impactful enough.
Solo queue looks a lot more spicy in comparison. Solo queue queens Riven and Fiora are still alive and well, but there are many interesting winners and losers. I will cover trends and new builds in depth in the future post!
There is a surge in mage champions like Ryze, Kennen and Anivia. Gamers are also playing more Vayne and Varus top again as niche counterpicks. Champions that use ignite or ghost well also gained quite a bit power in the solo queue department – not so much in lane but an extra tp or two per game helps a ton (notably Rumble, Riven, Fiora, Darius, Olaf, Gangplank, Renekton..). Watch out for those flex picks. There is a lot of overlap between top, mid, jungle and even adc.
until next time o7.