League Of Legends' Kayn Might Receive More Changes After Laning Nerfs

Some changes to League of Legends' Kayn shipped with Patch 7.16 that made a sizable impact to his laning phase, but the balance team remains open to more changes in order to keep lane Kayn viable.

Kayn has received more than one change since his recent lease, specifically those that altered the balance of his Assassin and Darkin forms. The most recent change affected Kayn's ability to build up his passive through damage-over-time attacks, one of the main sources of passive triggers that made Kayn's laning phase possible. With that tool gone, the balance team is open to considering changes if the nerf hurts Kayn too much.

"There's a change in 7.16 that makes it so that DoTs don't stack Kayn's passive extremely fast, which was allowing him to access his transformation much quicker than intended," Riot Meddler said about the changes. "That will probably have a minimal effect on jungle Kayn, but might hit lane Kayn pretty hard. If that's the case we'll be going back soon and taking a look at lane Kayn and whether we should be giving him some power in some other way."

Below is the exact change that was made to Kayn in the recent patch, nerfs that were technically never intentional and have been regarded as a bugfix.

"BUGFIX: Kayn no longer gains transformation progress from ticks of Corrupting Potion, Deathfire Touch, Red Buff, or Challenging Smite. (Other periodic effects, such as Ignite, already had no impact on transformation progress.)"

While most players take Kayn into the jungle anyway to take advantage of his mobility and the opportunity to plan your transformation by ganking and invading certain targets, laning as Kayn was made much easier by accruing his transformation orbs through DoT effects. By using Corrupting Potion and Deathfire Touch along with other similar attacks, he was able to transform pretty quickly to take advantage of transformations' powers.

Lane Kayn seems to be the main victim of these changes, but it's been suggested that jungle Kayn might have as much of a problem, if not more. With Deathfire Touch no longer an option on jungle Kayn to build up his transformations faster, more ganks will be needed to reach a transformation in a similar time frame. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does somewhat force a different playstyle than Kayn players have become accustomed to if they want to see pre-nerf results.

All of these factors are being taken into consideration for future changes to Kayn as the balance team observes the impact of the nerfs.