Subscribe
Follow Us
It may be the penultimate patch of Season 11, but League of Legends developers felt Xayah and Vi were a little too OP and hit them with nerfs on 11.22. The next patch, 11.23 which features new Cafe Cuties skin, had already gone live on the PBE. However, Riot stepped in for the current live patch and sent a hotfix to tune down Xayah and Vi's kits.
Vi had just recently undergone a rescript (perhaps in part for promoting Arcane). Still, the balance team felt they had to make the changes to fine-tune her kit a bit.
For her base stats, Vi's armor per level and attack damage (AD) per level both decline by half a point. When the champion levels up, the additional stats she gains will drop from 4 to 3.5 for armor, and 3.5 to 3 for AD. This will diminish how well she scales late. As for Vi's moves, her powerful ultimate, Assault and Battery, will also get a slightly shorter stun duration, going down from 1.4 to 1.3 seconds.
Meanwhile, Xayah mains have to deal with rather heavy nerfs to the Q (Double Daggers), with the base damage reduced at all ranks. Previously, her Q at max would deal 150 damage, but the hotfix now puts it at 125—which was the amount at rank four before the changes. The raw cooldown of the move is now also higher, increasing by a half-second at rank two and continuously until an additional two full seconds at rank five, from four to six second cooldowns.
These changes could perhaps dissuade a Q max and prevent players from just spamming out the ability to poke at opponents' health bars. Here are the specific numbers to crunch on the Q:
- Damage: 50/75/100/125/150 → 45/65/85/105/125
- Cooldown: 10/8.5/7/5.5/4 seconds → 10/9/8/7/6
Xayah's nerfs come as a result of a broken new build that abused her Q's really short cooldown. Because 11.22 also brought Lethality changes, Xayah mains quickly found that the marksman viable again—maybe exceptionally so. Instead of going for crit with items like Galeforce, players began rushing Eclipse and maxing Q to dish out significant poke damage, whereas before E was the typical move to max. The rest of the build includes Muramana, Infinity Edge, and either Serylda’s Grudge or Lord Dominik’s Regards.
As players noticed how OP the build was, Xayah's pick rate shot up to over 10 percent, when it was just over three percent before. Her win rate also rose a staggering four percent to 52.67%. It may not seem like much, but when you consider that that's a winrate across the entire League of Legends playerbase, that percentage is nothing to scoff at.
“[Xayah was] pretty wildly out of line and waiting [for] another patch would’ve caused a lot of messed up games, especially at the end of the ranked season,” Riot Phlox said on Reddit.
While the broken-ness was perhaps less apparent for Vi, Riot still felt that Vi's kit was a bit too overtuned after the rehaul of her script. According to Phlox, Vi's abilities had become a lot more “consistent” and that sent her “over the edge of balanced.”
