Hello and welcome everyone to our yet another summary of Riot’s 8/13 Quick Gameplay Thoughts. In today’s article, we are going to cover a small Lucian update that is going to be shipped in 11.17.
A quick TLDR
- Solo Lane early damage slightly down
- Lucian gains bonus on-hit damage when buffed by allies (including the Move Speed from W)
- R damage shifted to scale better with crit but starts at lower base damage
Riot Truexy’s explanation
Lucian’s been quite weak in regular play for most of Season 11 in all his roles. Even though role flexibility is a positive thing, problems start to appear when less played roles have much higher win rates than the most played role, and the nerfs to balance things out get complicated fairly easily.
Lucian falls into the category where his alternate role (Mid lane) dominates in Pro play,, leading to his main role being limited in regular play. Whenever Lucian is viable in solo queue, he quickly starts to dominate Mid lane picks and bans in Pro play, so his bot power in regular play is bound to his Mid power in coordinated play.
After understanding the core reasons why Lucian is powerful in coordinated play, the team moved on to see how they could address some of these points to hit the goal of the project: give power to Bot lane Lucian without Mid and Top Lucian dominating in pro play.
After a lot of various buffs and changes to his abilities, the team settled down with the following changes:
- Granting Lucian bonus damage whenever buffed by an ally, giving him more power to snowball a lead in Bot lane.
- Shifting The Culling (R) scalings from experience-based to item-based, which is more consistent between lanes.
This way Lucian should have a few more tools to help him feel better about heading to the bot lane while still sticking close to his independent, gunslinger identity.
If you want to read more, check out our article considering Gameplay Thoughts on Akshan.
