Master Yi, a champion long known to take over lower ELO League of Legends, recently received massive changes that shifted power away from his Lethality build. This resulted in a large increase to the champion’s win rate in just a few days, leading Riot Games to deploy a hotfix to his kit last night.
Following buffs aiming towards an on-hit build for Master Yi in Patch 12.5, Riot has pushed hotfix nerfs to live servers to take some newfound power away from the Wuju Bladesman. The new build path offering on-hit effects featuring Kraken Slayer, Blade of the Ruined King, and Guinsoo’s Rageblade, propelled Master Yi to one of the highest win rates of all junglers in the span of three days.
All of the damage associated with Master Yi’s Q has been nerfed in some capacity, including its base damage, bonus damage from critical hits, and the recently-increased on-hit damage it offered. The cooldown of the ability has not been changed.
The true damage on Yi’s E has been nerfed at later ranks, still affording the champion some power in the early game. His ultimate, which has been a static 65 seconds for a while, has benefited greatly from the changes in this patch. Therefore its cooldown has been drastically increased at all ranks, becoming a much less potent part of Yi’s ability to snowball.
In the description of these hotfix nerfs, Riot mentioned the changes are aimed at an immediate solution, though may be revisited in the future should they impact him too negatively. These extensive nerfs to on-hit Master Yi are live as part of an update to League’s Patch 12.5.
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