We have some bad news for all the fans of the Taric mid lane and jungler Master Yi combo in League of Legends—it’s about to be nerfed into the ground. This is probably good news, though, if you’re a normal, non-psychotic person who’s irritated by the rise of strategies like this one in the mid lane (or if you’re the LCK’s BBQ Olivers).
Riot is planning to throw a wrench into gold funneling in the mid lane, according to the company’s post on the official game forums yesterday. Gold funneling can best be described as one champion essentially giving all the resources from their respective role over to another hyper-carry type of champion. In other words, that’s Nunu giving his jungle to Karthus and Taric giving his mid lane farm to Yi.
Of course, it needs to be said that those two combos aren’t the only ones running rampant right now. They’re simply the more iconic ones. There’s a fair amount of Mordekaiser mid feeding his Shyvana jungle, Kayle mid feeding her Yi jungle, and more, too. It’s a safe assumption to make at the moment that if Yi is locked into a game, there’s a good chance someone on his team is planning to funnel gold into him.
For the most part, it seems like Riot has one big issue with the strategy, and that’s the fact that mid lane is typically very interactive and faster-paced than other lanes. This strategy dulls that play-making and interactivity down to almost zero as the mid laner simply waits around for their jungler to blow through and clear the waves for them.
To fix this, Riot is considering adding an over-level penalty to jungle camps. This essentially means that the higher the jungler’s level is than a jungle camp’s, the less experience they’ll get from it. There was an over-leveling penalty on jungle camps earlier this season, but if it returns anytime soon, it probably won’t be quite as severe as it used to be.
Riot is also considering champion-specific changes, such as adding damage reduction to Master Yi’s Alpha Strike when used on lane minions only, or possibly jungle items causing reduced experience gains from lane minions, too.
Either way, we expect they’ll arrive on the PBE soon and go live with either Patch 8.13 or 8.14.
