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With the recent long-awaited announcement of Yorick’s rework finally out, it’s a good time for Riot to take a step back and evaluate the champion update team. That’s exactly what was done Wednesday by Rioter Reav3 in a post on the company’s website.
In the post, Reav3 gives some insight on the recent mage reworks, the upcoming assassin reworks (there will be less of them so the team can better focus on making them perfect), the upcoming Warwick rework (“what if Warwick's kit actually encouraged players to gank often and early?”) and the Yorick rework. But one tidbit stands above the rest.
GALIO’S GETTING REWORKED, Y’ALL, AND IN A BIIIIIIIG WAY.
I’m happy to announce that after looking into a few projects, we finally got a solid direction on the next project that Team B will roll onto after Yorick. It's the champion people love to forget, Galio!
Reav3 expanded a bit on Galio’s current problems and the team’s goals with the upcoming rework.
Currently Galio has a lot of problems. His theme, gameplay, and art hasn’t aged very well at all. This gives us a pretty wide canvas to paint on and Galio will likely be our largest transformation to date. So what are our goals with Galio? With Galio we want to see if we can really deliver on a mid lane focused tank/mage , as we think that opens up a lot of interesting strategies (not that he has to be played exclusively mid of course). We also think that him being some sort of statue/construct is super important as well as his strong ties to Demacia.
So what can we expect to see? Since he’s a statue/construct, maybe some fun unique interactions with towers? Definitely expect a visual update as well as a kit update -- as Reav3 said, it’s likely their biggest to date (and each of the past few reworks were pretty big in their own right).
According to Champion.GG’s data of ranked games platinum and above on Patch 6.17, Galio is the 43rd most popular mid laner (out of 46) and the 55th most popular top laner (out of 56).