Riot Games released Patch 13.9 on May 3, and alongside the balance changes, there were a couple of bug fixes included. While these tweaks are usually made to improve the interactions between champions, this bug fix ended up having the opposite effect, killing one of Lee Sin’s key mechanics: the quick ward jump.
The developers fixed an interaction where if Lee Sin cast his Safeguard (W) on something that died as he was ward jumping, it would place the ability on cooldown for its full duration with no dash or shield.
According to a Reddit user on May 3, this bug fix disabled the ability to do quick ward hops. While you can still pull off ward jumps, there is a small fraction of a second where the champion doesn’t instantly dash to the placed ward. For proficient Lee Sin mains, this change will heavily impact their gameplay since many early-game skirmishes are decided on these details.
Related: Here are the LoL Patch 13.9 patch notes
The delay makes the jungler feel clunky and unusable from the player’s perspective, and predictable by the enemies since they will know where Lee Sin is planning to ward jump to. It also makes ward hop Insec kicks almost impossible to pull off since the ward jump would take too long for the combo to work, even if you’re spamming W.
As a Lee Sin main myself, with hundreds of thousands of mastery points, I spent a couple of minutes in the practice tool to test it out. You can feel a slight delay between the moment you placed the ward and the dash from W, and on top of that, it never feels consistent, making it even harder to adjust to the new interaction.
With the hopes that Riot can fix the bug, Lee Sin might not be a champion you’re looking to play this patch. His win rate has plummeted to a worrying 47 percent win rate at all ranks, and below 46 percent at the highest Elos (according to U.GG).
