Riot Games has released an unexpected micro patch for League of Legends in an attempt to hotfix some balance issues with Skarner since his VGU was released earlier in the week.
The micropatch, which is now live in League of Legends, is almost entirely focused on Skarner’s balance. According to Matt Leung-Harrison, lead gameplay designer on League of Legends, the patch is focused on buffing Skarner in the jungle while nerfing him in the top lane.
In terms of actual changes, Skarner’s mana growth has been reduced from 60 to 45, while his monster damage from his passive and Q have been increased to make jungling a little easier. Then his W mana cost has been increased, and his E cooldown has been decreased.
“Right now, Top is outperforming Jungle when at low mastery (yet to be seen whether that’s the case when mastered though). High mastery Skarners are performing pretty well on him,” said Leung-Harrison on X. “We think despite his low average winrates, he’s still quite strong, but has several optimizations that need to be learned (eg. Q before E, etc.) Another thing we’ve heard a lot about is about how heavy his Q feels in pulling the rock and standing still. We’re trying to thread the needle between impactful & adding sufficient counterplay. We want this ability to hit like a truck and having Skarner channel for a bit to let that be fair is a work in progress.”
According to, Riot Pehrek, another developer at Riot Games, the patch also includes a few bug fixes related to Skarner.
The changes come just days after Skarner was reworked with a VGU in the 14.7 patch. The initial reaction to the rework was mostly positive, with players enjoying the new look champion despite clearly taking a fair bit of time to learn given the low win rates he has seen. Nerfing a champion that hasn’t had a great win rate is a little unusual, but clearly, the dev team wants to see Skarner in the jungle rather than only in the top lane so the changes make sense from that perspective.
You can probably expect further changes to Skarner when League of Legends patch 14.8 launches in just over a week and the team has had more time to see how the community is playing him. The current patch schedule has the new patch releasing on April 17, and while it likely won’t include anything as big as the VGU, there should be some interesting balance changes to be revealed.
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