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The Teamfight Tactics ranked season is only a week old and already most players know their favorite and most hated team comps. Thankfully, Riot’s on top of balancing for the mode and it’s already bringing a few changes to help nerf some of the more dominant strategies.
So far, ranked has been dominated by Assassins and carry Volibear. Chances are, if you don’t have one you’re probably going the other. But with this patch, both strategies have received a slight nerf. The nerf to Volibear seems a little bit bigger, but that’s understandable, his whole role in the game was to carry a whole team all by his lonesome, so his power was clearly a little too high.
Also getting changed this patch are a few items like Cursed Blade, which is going to be a little bit less effective, and Morellonomicon which will now burn for five percent of an enemies health, rather than just three percent. Players will also be happy to hear that Riot seems to have sorted out the Raptor bug, meaning that they should once again always drop an item when they die — something that wasn’t always happening last patch.
For a full look at everything that changed with today’s patch you can see our full Teamfight Tactics patch 9.14B notes.
Assassins have been nerfed
This change was always on the way. With Assassins dominating the meta and a perfect bonus addition with just about any other comp in the game they certainly needed a nerf. But Assassins only lost 25 percent of their critical strike damage at the three unit tier, this takes the bonus down from 150 percent to 125 percent. They still keep their huge 350 percent critical strike damage bonus for having six Assassins which should mean that Assassins are still good, they’re just a little bit more of a commitment.
Volibear isn’t quite the monster he used to be
For most of the last week, stacking your Volibear full of items has pretty much been enough to win any game you’re in ... or at least come close. With such strong carry potential, Riot seems to want to pull some of Volibear’s natural strength out of his kit, so he’s getting a nerf here. Riot is taking his armor down from 35 to 30, and his attack speed down from .65 to .55. These changes should be big for Volibear and make him a solid part of team compositions without letting him solo carry a whole team.
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Elementalists took a big hit
Elementalists are incredibly easy to tech into. They only require three units to get the bonus, and when Daisy does join the fight she’s always useful, not matter what’s in the rest of your comp. But Daisy is going to be slightly less tanky after this patch as Riot took her health down from 2,500 to 2,200.
The Wild bonus is a little better now
After one nerf early on in the TFT beta, Wild has been fighting its way back to relevance. The latest step on that path came in this patch when the Origin got a nice bonus to its attack speed. Now when you have four Wilds they’ll grant 10 percent attack speed to all their allied units — up from 8 percent attack speed last patch.
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Cursed Blade won’t curse quite so often
Cursed Blade is easily one of Teamfight Tactics’ best items thanks to its ability to negate so much of your opponents gold with just one lucky shot. Thankfully for everyone playing against it, Cursed Blade will now only curse 20 percent of the time, rather the 25 percent it was at before. Even with the nerf though, the item will certainly still be strong on characters like Gunslingers.