League of Legends Is Testing Another New Wukong Update Next Month

League of Legends players who've been playing Wukong throughout the year will probably know that Riot Games has been working on updating the champion's abilities. We've seen several different versions of the champion proposed in the past few months as Riot worked internally to modernize Wukong's abilities with champion designer Riot Lutzburg leading the update. Following several progress reports and discussions within the Wukong community, Riot is preparing to bring a new version of the champion to the PBE servers in January.

Riot Lutzburg said as much about Wukong in the champion designer's latest boards post about the champion that said the Monkey King was "Prepped for PBE." Goals outlined for Wukong included making it so that players could build a variety of items and work towards roles like Assassin or Bruiser without being forced into one playstyle while also creating new opportunities that focus on Wukong's themes.

These changes will hopefully be achieved by Wukong's updated abilities, some of which deal with smaller changes while others give or take away effects from the moves. You can see the full changelist below.

Passive – Stone Skin:

• NEW- For 3 seconds after exiting brush or stealth, Wukong gains a physical damage shield equal to 12% of his maximum health. This effect can trigger once every 10 seconds.
• REMOVED- Wukong no longer gains bonus resistances based on nearby enemy Champions

Q- Wuju Strike:

• Mana cost lowered to 25 from 40
• CD reduced by 1 second at all ranks
• Damage adjusted to 1AD +20/40/60/80/100 damage (+.5 bonus AD) from 10/40/70/100/130 (+1/1.1/1.2/1.3/1.4 total AD)

W- Warrior Trickster:

• Now instantly dashes towards the player's cursor instead of a short range blink
• Dash is 350 range and 1200 speed. Can NOT go over walls
• Clone is now treated as a stationary Champion and will attack nearby enemies, prioritizing the last enemy Wukong damaged
• Clone's attacks deal a scaling 60-100% of Wukong's AD based on spell rank and applies on-hit effects, but cannot crit
• Clone looks identical to Wukong's animation state on spawn, and animates as if he pressed the "S" key
• Cooldown increased to 24/21/18/15/12 sec (from the time of initial cast) from 18/16/14/12/10 (from the time the clone disappears)
• Stealth duration reduced to 1 sec from 1.5
• Note: you may encounter a few bugs with the clone's target acquisition- we're working on these!

E- Nimbus Strike:

• Now deals magic damage instead of physical (but still scales with Attack Damage)

R- Cyclone:

• Tick rate increased to every .25 seconds from .5 (damage per tick halved to compensate)
• Each tick of damage now applies Conqueror
• Damage ratio increased to 1.25 AD/sec from 1.1
• Bonus MS% is now a flat 30/40/50% instead of ramping up over the duration
• E's attack speed buff renews itself while R is active
• Wukong can now cancel R early by casting another ability or recasting R

Another version of Wukong's abilities was revealed months ago in May when the update discussions first began. The new changes listed above should be on the PBE in the first week of January.