League of Legends Patch 10.2 preview: Aphelios set for BIG nerfs

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League of Legends. Photo courtesy of Riot Games. /

Champions

Jinx

"Passive – Get Excited! Now triggers when Jinx kills an epic monster."

A pleasant Quality of Life change for Jinx. Previously it felt a bit odd that turrets and inhibitors granted Get Excited!, but Baron Nashor didn’t, so this is certainly a nice change for the Jinx mains out there.

All in all, this buff will add to her DPS in team fights around major objectives but is quite situational so we should only see a small increase to her 51.73% win rate.

It’s also assumed that “Jinx kills an epic monster” actually means “Jinx contributes to the killing of an epic monster” to match the other aspects of her passive.

Karma

"Q – Inner Flame Damage: 80/125/170/215/260 -> 90/135/180/225/270 W – Focused Resolve Damage: 30/55/80/105/130 -> 40/65/90/115/140"

Enchanter supports have seen a resurgence over preseason and on Patch 10.1, all except for Karma who sits in the lower tiers of the support champion pool with a poor 48.44% win rate.

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This can be explained by the flurry of nerfs the champion received in the back-end of Season 9 targeted towards the solo lane iterations of Karma, of which support Karma was caught in the crossfire. Now she’s a shadow of her former self and definitely requires some buffs to bring her back to full strength.

Inner Flame is Karma’s poke tool in lane which she throws out four or five times per minute to whittle down the enemy HP bar, this buff will see her Q damage increase by 20-30 per minute before resistances. Focused Resolve is reserved for all-ins, and is really only used once per skirmish, which means she gets +10 damage for a bot lane fight from the second buff.

Overall, this is definitely a nice set of buffs for Karma and will help her out a little, but that’s it really. We won’t see Karma flying up the support tier list from a +20 damage buff any time soon.

Lulu

"Base Stats Armor: 28.22 -> 29 Attack Damage: 46.368 -> 47 E – Help, Pix! Cooldown: 10 -> 8"

Did we say Karma was the only one left out of the enchanter party? We forgot to mention Lulu, who finds herself in a similar situation struggling at the bottom of the support tier list with a 49.10% win rate on Patch 10.1.

You can ignore the base stats buffs as those numbers are simply being rounded up and will have a negligible, unnoticeable impact on the champion. The Help, Pix! buff, on the other hand, will help Lulu out and make her a tad more useful in skirmishes and team fights.

In the early game, this is a flat 2-second reduction to her E cooldown, meaning she’ll have her shield available slightly earlier and this could prevent her ADC from dying to an all-in every so often. In the later stages, Help, Pix!’s cooldown will be decreased to just 4.4 seconds from CDR, meaning Lulu’s shield will have a downtime of just 1.9 seconds, which is pretty short.

Lulu players love this buff as it means she can almost permanently shield her marksman from incoming damage in late game team fights, while also offering a smaller CD window in the laning phase.

Will this change make Lulu the strongest support in League of Legends? No. Will this change see Lulu’s win rate hit 50% and place her in the A/B tier of the support tier list? Most likely.

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