Following a lukewarm performance after his League of Legends launch, the game’s newest champion, Akshan, has been buffed again. The changes follow the first mid-patch update for Akshan that came just days after his release. Riot Games said that the champion will be left alone for the rest of the Patch 11.15 cycle now that the latest update is live with Riot planning to reassess the state of Akshan afterwards.
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When Akshan was first buffed on July 23rd, it was his base attack damage and health that were both buffed along with a lower cooldown on his Avengerang ability. Now, he’s been given more attack speed with the Avengerang also dealing more damage to minions later in the game, too. His low attack speed has been one of the complaints about the champion since he was released with waveclear being another issue, so the two changes released on Wednesday appear to be direct responses to those sorts of concerns.
1 more Akshan micropatch today.
We were very cautious of his revive mechanic in terms of release balance. That said, he’s still at a very low win rate and so may have been too conservative. We’re giving him a final 11.15 buff, and will reassess next patch.
— Jeevun Sidhu (@JeevunSidhu) July 28, 2021
Final 11.15 Akshan buff micropatch is live:
Attack Speed per level up 2.5% >>> 4%
— Jeevun Sidhu (@JeevunSidhu) July 28, 2021
Q damage to minions 40-70% >>> 40-90%
League of Legends’ lead game designer Jeevun Sidhu who worked on Akshan alongside associate champion designer Glenn Anderson shared the news of the update in the tweets above alongside Riot’s plans to look at Akshan again later. The changes have not made it to the game’s patch notes yet where the other mid-patch update for Akshan is noted, but that should change soon seeing how the new Akshan buffs have only been live for a couple of hours now.
When speaking to Riot about Akshan prior to the champion’s release, we learned that he was balanced around his Going Rogue ability which allows him to revive teammates that have been recently killed. Doing so would avoid having a champion who could revive his team while also 1v5ing the enemy team, but Sidhu said Akshan is “still at a very low win rate” that signaled those balancing efforts and the first micropatch might’ve been “too conservative.”
Along with our talks about Akshan’s ultimate, we also learned from Riot how the developers managed to pull off the release of Akshan not just in League of Legends but also in three other games. You can read about that first-of-its-kind project here.
