Riot Games Is Looking At Potential Mage Buffs
By Zac Cameron ·
Despite all the attention on the bot lane, the current Meta has not been kind to mid lane mages either.
It seems that Riot Games has heard the cries of mid lane mage mains, using a post on the official forums to talk about some thoughts the balance team has for upcoming patches. The majority of the attention lately has been on the bot lane, as Marksman are forced out of the role in favor of bruisers and other Champions that can scale up a lot faster. This has had an unfortunate side effect of also pushing out a lot of mid lane mage Champions, with not a lot of attention being given to formerly strong Champions that are now too weak to compete.
As a part of the larger post, Riot Meddler has outlined a few possible changes that the team will be looking at in upcoming patches, detailed as follows:
We've just done some initial planning for patch 8.14. Some of the things we'll be looking at:
- Monitoring how our changes in 8.13 that impact bot lane, gold/xp funneling and snowball have gone, in particular to see if we should go further in 8.14.
- Looking at mage balance, with a focus on mages who've been left in too weak a state after the 8.9 mana changes. We'll be assessing a range of champions for that, with changes expected to some, but not all of them. Some possible candidates include Syndra, Annie, Vel'Koz, Ahri, Cass, Viktor and Ori. Likely that some of those champions don't get buffed and some not on that list do though as we dig into things more.
- Likely a buff to Karma. We're working on some longer term stuff for her, but will likely give her some straight power as well in the short term.
- Potentially a buff to Liandries.
The full post also goes into detail about a possible change to the patch cycle, as well as some other changes the team is looking at. For more on how the current Meta is changing things up, check out Fnatic’s decision to swap out their AD Carry for another top laner for today’s game, here.