Winners and Losers in League of Legends Patch 7.10

Welcome to League of Legends Patch 7.10, or the aftermath of the Mid-Season Update. Usually, these patches are just filled with a ton of nerfs or buffs to the champions who were touched up in the Mid-Season Update, but 7.10 has quite a bit more than that going on under the hood. The patch includes an unexpected rework to both Heimerdinger and Rammus, both of whom got updated with more modern kits to…varying levels of success. Of course, all three champions that were reworked in 7.9 are again getting changes, and 7.10 likely marks the end of the League of Sejuani, while perhaps being the patch that also brings back top lane Maokai.

There’s a lot going on in this patch, so keep your seatbelts on! Let’s take a look at the biggest winners and losers of patch 7.10! (and note that this is, by no means, a comprehensive list)

Rammus

First off, we have the patch’s successful rework. Rammus is getting a huge host of changes in patch 7.10 that threaten to make him one of the preeminent tank junglers once more. While it’s still unclear how much better the changes will make his clear speed, which is Rammus’ biggest issue at the moment, it’s likely to be a huge difference, as his new kit seems optimized for jungling in a way that his prior kit really wasn’t.

Headlining the rework are huge changes to Powerball and Rammus’ passive, which has been renamed and reworked. Powerball has had it’s duration dropped all the way down to 6 seconds, but Rammus now accelerates faster and, more importantly, can reuse the ability more often. At maximum rank, the cooldown and duration are actually equivalent, which is a massive change for the champion. While it’s unlikely to come into play until very late in the game — Powerball has traditionally been a one point wonder skill for Rammus — it will make a huge impact once the late game comes around, and changes to Defensive Ball Curl also make it less appetizing to level up.

Whether you’re a tank lover or just a regular speed demon, you can’t sleep on the new Rammus. Take him a whirl, and let us know what you think of him!

Heimerdinger

If you enjoyed playing Heimerdinger before, then have I got bad news for you! Riot Games, in the name of “counterplay” reworked Heimerdinger in a fashion that they claim is supposed to give him more game impact, as well as bigger playmaking moments. What they really did is completely butcher what the champion already had going for him and give him almost nothing in return.

The crux of the changes are to Heimerdinger’s turrets. They now no longer charge up their beam attacks when attacking enemies, and they no longer spawn with 70% of their charge timer filled. As “compensation”, they now fully charge their beams if Heimerdinger hits a champion with all of his missiles or a grenade. Put simply, Heimerdinger will no longer be able to rely on having wave control thanks to his turrets, since they’re now quite terrible at pushing waves when compared to, say, a Dark Sphere. While Heimerdinger’s other abilities have been buffed, the buffs are quite light, and certainly don’t make up for the gutting his turret received. If you were, for some reason, a Heimerdinger main before, then stay far, far away now.

Zac

Zac is getting a whole host of small changes on patch 7.10, but it’s the single big change that he’s getting that makes the difference. Upon his release, the new Zac ended up tanking horribly despite all expectations, as all of the crowd control that Riot gave him was unreliable, and his damage had been nerfed so heavily that it was hard to figure out what to do with him. To make matters worse, Elastic Slingshot’s knock-up timer was halved, which made living up to the fantasy of bouncing an enemy carry back into your team with Let’s Bounce! nearly impossible. Enemy champions could just walk out of it.

Well, that’s a problem of the past now, as a fully charge Elastic Slingshot now once again knocks up for a full second, making it wasy to trap enemy champions in Let’s Bounce!. While they still get a .1-second long chance to escape, that’s unlikely to be relevant outside of flashes. Suffice it to say that you can now live the dream on Zac, and that may just be enough to get him out of the doldrums.

Lee Sin

Once again, the League’s immortal jungler has found himself on the chopping block. Lee Sin has been the best jungler or close to it for the entire history of the game, practically, and few players outside of Lee Sin mains are ever sad to see him get nerfed. This round, however, is especially brutal, as the latest nerfs are targeting his utility, not his damage as was the case previously. 

Lee is getting two nerfs, one minor, one extreme. The first is a nerf to his movement speed, which is now 5 lower than it was before. While that’s obviously a factor of some kind, it’s unlikely to matter all that much in the scheme of things. That’s hardly the case with his second nerf, however, which is to the cooldown of Dragon’s Rage. It now has a 110 second cooldown at rank 1, which is starting to approach the territory of extremely powerful ults like Assault and Battery and Curse of the Sad Mummy. Lee Sin only gets the nod over Elise at that moment due to the huge powerspike he gets at level 6, and making his ults cooldown such a long one will make that power spike far less pronounced. While that’s unlikely to kill the champion, it’s probably enough to make the Spider Queen the early game jungler of choice.

Maokai

Apparently, Maokai’s saplings are something of a game balance issue at the moment, as Riot buffed them to such ludicrous extremes that the most effective playstyle for Maokai is, at the moment, stacking AP and just hoping to instantly kill enemies that walk into his brush. Well, Riot isn’t a huge fan of that style of game play, as it turns out, nor are they fans of the support Maokai playstyle that has evolved in response to it. Sapling damage is taking a huge hit on patch 7.10, but Maokai is getting some huge buffs to compensate. 

Most notably, Arcane Smash is getting buffed up to be, more or less, on the same level that it was before it was chain nerfed just prior to the Maokai rework. While that doesn’t mean that top lane Maokai will be a thing again for sure, all signs point in that direction. After the first few levels Maokai is even more of a house than he was before, and many of the most popular top lane champions at the moment wouldn’t do much to stop him. Both Shen and Galio can only push minions into Maokai after one item, as attempting to trade with him is folly thanks to the new and improves Sap Magic. Don’t be surprised if you start seeing Maokai creep back into the top lane again. He’s definitely not a wasted pick there anymore.