League of Legends: Riot Announces Finalized Malzahar Changes

Had you asked any ardent League of Legends player what the most unexpectedly powerful support in League of Legends history was a month ago, there's no doubt that they would tell you that it was Malzahar. The only reason why he wouldn't be the first is due to the rise of AP support Maokai over the course of the last few weeks, which is a pick that makes support Malzahar seem absolutely sensical by comparison. Even the type of players that were normally early adopters of strange Korean solo queue metagame movements were stumped by support Malzahar, who didn't catch on in popularity outside of Korea until the LCK started up earlier this year.

Despite players' initial reluctance, Malzahar went on to not only be a strong player in the metagame over the course of the last few months, he spent quite a while as the go-to support even over champions like Karma or Zyra, both of whom were incredibly strong at that point. By now, Riot has determined that support Malzahar is a balance issue, and has been taking steps to reign him in, but there's only one slight problem with that. Mid lane Malzahar.

See, while nerfs to champions like Braum and Zyra tend to only affect those champions' capacity to support -- neither of the two are at all viable in other lanes, regardless of how buff their numbers are -- nerfs to Malzahar affect mid lane Malzahar as well, which is a niche but still not altogether uncommon pick. Malzahar has long been used to counter champions like Fizz or Ekko in the mid lane, both of whom have been becoming increasingly popular as of late. While support Malzahar may well be a balance problem, you would be hard pressed to say the same about mid lane Malzahar. Thus, Riot has determined that any changes they will make to Malzahar will affect his ability to support, but not his ability to play the mid lane -- a hard task to pull off successfully.

These changes posted by RicklessAbandon earlier today look to do just that, though just how effectively they do that is up for debate. The short version of the changes are that Voidlings are getting brutally nerfed to do less damage, die more easily to AOE, and to be even easier to kill via auto attacks. A single basic attack now kills a voidling regardless of it's HP, making them an unreliable tool, to say the least. The other major change is to Nether Grasp, which has had it's percent damage absolutely trashed, but received some of its old flat damage back in return alongside a truly massive AP ratio. A max rank Nether Grasp will now deal a whopping 375 (+115% AP) damage, which will take 75% of the hp off half the champions in the game all by itself.

However, it's hard to ignore the impact of the voidling change. Until he amasses a huge amount of AP, Malzahar is reliant on using his voidlings to farm minions waves quickly along with Malefic Visions. Having those voidlings be so easy to kill is going to hurt Malzahar's early laning, even if he did randomly gain 135% more AP in damage on his kit between the various buffs. Malzahar can have all the late game one-shot potential in the world, but it won't meant anything if he can't get there. Just ask Veigar, who suffers from the same problem, but also has the luxury of not immobilizing himself when casting his huge damage ultimate.

Regardless, one thing can be said for sure. These changes utterly and completely remove support Malzahar from the game. If all you care about is getting hit by Nether Grasp much less often, then these changes are going to be ones that you love. For those that enjoy being on the safe end of Malzahar's voidling onslaught, however, it seems that Patch 7.11 will be a bittersweet one.