If you’re a League of Legends marksman or mid lane enthusiast, you might want to cover your eyes.
Riot Games might be implementing some massive changes to assassin Mythic items that could drastically affect how effective these burst champions can be—and they are already causing a ruckus within the community. One item, in particular, has especially stirred the pot with its revamped passive, and players are already expecting the worst.
On League‘s PBE server today, the developers have begun to drop its sweeping item changes for players to try, including a new version of Duskblade of Draktharr that features a rebuilt Nightstalker passive. This passive used to turn users invisible for 1.5 seconds when they would score a takedown against an enemy champion within three seconds of damaging them. This will be replaced once this item rework goes live.
Instead, the new Nightstalker passive is bringing even more heat by first dealing up to 15 percent extra damage based on a target’s missing health. Additionally, Duskblade users will turn untargetable for 1.5 seconds if they score a takedown against an enemy champion within three seconds of damaging them.
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This is a massive buff for almost all assassins since they can now jump into an enemy team to burst a key carry, while still having the absolute safety of untargetability to escape with their life immediately after the kill. The cooldown on this Nightstalker passive is 10 seconds, which means they could actually circle around and stall before pouncing forward, bursting another target, and slinking away.
When this change was revealed, many members of the League community responded on social media, voicing their concern and disbelief. Some are worried that this will cause a massive play rate spike for champions like Kha’Zix, Master Yi, Zed, and other burst-like champions that could become a problem with untargetability.
These changes do not have a set release date yet, however, which means they might not be implemented if the passive isn’t able to land in a healthy state with the player base. At the moment, players are very unhappy with the potential of such an item, which could lead to more changes to the Nightstalker passive moving forward.