The Noxian Grand General is getting buffs to boost his bot lane role, even as he keeps winning there as the LoL season rolls on.
The League of Legends balance team is looking to overcome several "core problems" with Swain in the Season 14 metagame by heaping buffs on the battlemage, with the main focus centred on making him stronger in the bot lane.
Commentator turned balance guru David "Phreak" Turley shared these new LoL champion changes — which should also help Swain's mid lane play — on Monday. While everything's still tentative as internal tests begin, several abilities expected to change: Swain's E and Ultimate will get major tweaks while his base stats, scaling, and Q and W abilities will get smaller changes as Riot Games now works towards helping the "extremely popular" champ feel better.
For Swain's E ability, Nevermove, the changes will focus around its damage and making its first and second casts "much faster." Similarly, his Demonic Ascension Ultimate will have its damaging Demonflare power available more often alongside Riot moving more power into the soulfire nova.
"Goal one is to fix mid/bot satisfaction," Phreak explained. "We don't have a win rate budget so it's more about what trade-offs we can make to have Swain feel better to play without raising win rate. We want to get to the point where Swain feels great and is popular. Then, [we want to] give some strict win rate support to Swain support... we want to make [him] feel good to play for all those players who are playing that, who are the majority of players these days."
A proper mini-rework for Swain by the end of the year, the LoL balance chief added, would be the battlemage feeling more fun without actually winning more.
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Swain buffs will be power-level balancing act
Swain certainly has very little room to move on the win rate front; LoL stat tracking site U.GG ranks the Noxian Grand General as the second strongest champion in the game when played bot lane, where he boasts a 53.53% win rate. He wins nearly the same percentage of matches in mid lane too, scoring victory 52.35% of the time. In support he appears in 1.2% of games.
"Swain wins a lot of games in mid lane and bot lane but he feels really bad to play there," Phreak continued, adding that balancing how often Swain wins with how great he feels to play has become "a bit of a Catch 22."
Solving that will now be Riot's biggest challenge. Whether that will happen in time for LoL Patch 14.21 remains to be seen, though it's unlikely — the buffs may even have to wait until Season 15 begins.
Nothing's been added to the LoL PBE for testing yet either. This esports.gg writer confirmed Swain's last change there is still his Demonic Ascension bugfixes.
Stick around on esports.gg for more LoL news and updates.
