Hello G&G Championships Contenders (and everyone else)!
Patch 12.8 comes after the patch the G&G Championship will be played on, but before the actual competition takes place. We're treading lightly this patch to maintain a stable meta and practice environment for pros, as well as a consistent Ranked experience for everyone else during our final few patches of Ranked climbing! Where we have changes, they're focused on buffing underwhelming strategies, buffing the weakest 3-star 4-cost champions, and adjusting our attack speed slow system.
Large, like my desire to hatch the Golden Egg!
Buffing Quickestsilver to make all options viable when getting the Radiant Relics Augment! Quickestsilver ⇒ Quickestersilver
Vertical Chemtech lost a lot of survivability after we nerfed the trait's damage reduction, so we're giving some back in a more appreciable (and counterable) way.
Scrap is one of the most contested comps in the game. The power of 4 Scrap is mostly in the item component conversion, but right now the shield is so huge that the trait is universally powerful.
Small, like your backliner's attack speed after a Frozen Heart Ekko hops on your carry.
We're shifting our attack speed slow tiers, mainly to hit the 30% level that feels strong enough to play, but not too oppressive that it's frustrating to play against. Our new tiers are 20/30/40/50%. 20% is for mildly impactful but mostly annoying, 30% is standard and pretty strong, 40% is painful and will be rare, and 50% will be reserved for ultra sharp brief moments.
With these tiers, we will be nerfing the more accessible attack speed slows from Ekko and Frozen Heart (later), but also buffing our harder to hit ones, Eternal Winter and Renata Glasc, which have been underperforming.
Ashe and Zilean have had their attack speed slows altered with our changes to the attack speed debuff system. Now, we got to Zilean’s tooltip in time, but we failed to update Ashe’s tooltip in time for the patch’s lock, so her attack speed slow may still read 15% when it is slowing by 20%. Sorry we’ve been s l o w e d b y o u r o w n s l o w d e b u f f.
Even at 1-star, Gangplank is generating too much gold. This small nerf should keep Gangplank from becoming Gangbank... or is it Bankplank?
Making sure 3-star 4-costs are worth the investment.
With our attack speed adjustments, we can give Renata's attack speed slow a small buff to help her control the battlefield and keep things Glascy.
Reeling in the loose cannon.
As described in the Augment section above, we're restructuring our attack speed slow system, and using the new system to provide needed buffs and nerfs.
Previously when players took damage in Double Up, we would take the incoming damage, cut it in half, round it down and save the remainder. In the early game this could result in scenarios where you would reinforce an ally, your ally's units would die, but you'd still win, making your opponent take 1 point of damage cut in half, and then rounded down. Taking 0 damage (with the half point of damage saved for later) feels strange, so we're changing that to be more intuitive.