Balance Hotfix March 26th

Hey y'all,

We wanted to respond quickly to the rushing objective meta that has developed. Most of these changes are targeted at addressing that.

Outside of that Arondight was a top performer and while we want to keep the active strong, it was also too good in the stats it provided.

Titan's Bane and Obsidian Shard are part of a larger scale Penetration adjustment we want to do, but felt like getting this in could allow Carries and Mids to have a much more potent tool against being run down by bruisers and tanks; but with a cost indicative of how strong the effect is.

Warrior's Axe is also being adjusted to discourage Carries from starting it while still keeping it viable for the brawlers in the Solo lane.

It's something we have kept an eye on, but so long as people who are building Death's Toll, Leather Cowl, and Ornate succeed (outside of top level player most people build these and succeed, with Ornate being a bit underwhelming) the flexibility is cool.

Warrior's Axe was hit mostly because it led to a lot of play pattern frustration. Trading some stats for stronger jungle control near the lane with Bumba's feels like an interesting tradeoff, and I see why top level values it.

That strategy does become weaker as a whole with this patch, so in theory reasons for doing it are also going down compared to the more standard starters.

Another reason for buffing them would be to just bring up carries as a whole, but as a role they seem to be doing OK. So yeah, we could buff them but the urgency for that doesn't seem super high.

No, they will give 25%.

Since Merlin Patch they SAID they give 25%, but were giving 15%. The change means the tooltip is now correct. The note was there just so people didn't think we were nerfing the item by adding ~700 gold to them.

That is a UI display bug. Because we 'unified' Physical and Magical Penetration across the board, all these items actually have X% Physical Penetration and X% Magical Penetration.

Our tooltips automatically generate what stats an item has, and for these items we have to override it but we missed that on Heartseeker.

tl;dr Yes, it is only supposed to provide 10% Penetration.

If objectives aren't being rushed down as quickly, it probably lengthens the game which helps this case.

Just looking at a random sampling of games, ~500GPM is pretty reasonable pace, underestimating a hair. So this delays the item a teamfight if you are teamfighting around every ult cooldown. Napkin math, but feels fair.

It does delay it but if you are identifying that tank pressure is disrupting your play, saving for a tool that will be more strongly countering to that I think is a fair tradeoff.

Our future changes will make this a bit easier, but if we just buffed it without raising the cost it creates a different side of the % Penetration issue.