More changes for Ryze’s kit are on the horizon

Yesterday, Riot Repertoir, lead live gameplay designer for League of Legends, popped on the forums to chat about Ryze changes headed to the PBE. This is his last chance before Riot decides to balance him exclusively for professional play, so let’s hope these changes are good.

According to Repertoir, there are several goals here with the Ryze change. First, they wanted to make Ryze weaker in the laning phase by giving him more reasons to cast Rune Prison. Next, they want him to come online even later than he does now. They want his wave clear to go down significantly as well and they’re changing Rune Prison to make his lockdown less reliable.

To balance this, they want to give Ryze some extra late game damage on his E and give Realm Warp a bigger cast radius with a longer cooldown. Finally, they are giving Ryze a bit of a quality of life buff. Thanks to some new Irelia tech, all of Ryze’s abilities will now cast a bit smoother with spell queueing.

Riot Games

The changes have made it to the PBE as of this writing, so let’s see how things are changing.

The extra spell rank on Overload has been reduced and added back to his ultimate. The damage scaling on Overload has also been altered, with AP scaling up and mana scaling down. Overload also has a new effect, dealing additional damage on enemies already effected with Flux. His shield mechanic and bonus move speed has also been altered somewhat.

Rune Prison no longer has any kind of mana cost and instead restores a percentage of Ryze’ mana. However, it is no longer a root and instead slows the target by 50 percent for 1.5 seconds. The cooldown has been lowered in the late game to compensate and the mana bonus for damage has been increased. When cast on a target effected by Spell Flux, Rune Prison will now root the target instead of slowing them.

Riot Games

Spell Flux’s cooldown has been reduced in the late game and its AP ratio has been upped by 10 percent. However, the mana ratio has gone down. When spreading Flux through its own special interaction with itself, it will now do 100 percent of its normal damage rather than only 50.

Ryze’s ultimate has the fewest changes, although they are still pretty significant. Realm Warp can now be upgraded three times like most ultimates. The range of Realm Warp has been upped to 4000 at all ranks, a full 1000 units from the old level two version. However, the cooldown has changed from 180 at all levels to 300 seconds at level one, 240 seconds at level two, and 180 seconds at level three.

Ryze has always been Riot’s problem child and has warranted more reworks and changes than any other champion. Let’s hope that these changes can finally put the blue boy to rest. For the sake of those of us who have to cover all these changes at the very least. Sheesh.