One of the biggest changes from this patch is the Ryze rework, which turned him into a more spammy, AP carry style toon. Though I was originally a little skeptical of the changes, I think it has turned out well so far.

So what’s different? Well, for one, his Overload cooldown has been cut in half. It still scales with mana, a mechanic that was also added to his Rune Prison, which also now has a longer range. Spell Flux still functions the same way, just with a longer cast range, and his ult now gives extra mana and some spell vamp in place of the ability power.

The biggest change for Ryze is his build. I’ve always liked a mana stack on Ryze, but now it’s far and away the most efficient build for him. Mana is pretty cheap when compared to AP, and the mana items in the game offer all sorts of other cool benefits, like a spell shield or massive cooldown reduction. On the forums, Phreak mentioned that Frozen Heart -> Banshee’s Veil is his most efficient build. It’s a nice set of defensive stats along with big cooldown reduction and healthy pool of mana for extra damage. The problem is, it’s sort of tough to know where to go from there.

Against tanky teams I’ve been building a Rod of Ages, which is obviously a nice boost to his mana pool with the added benefit of more survivability. Beyond that, though, there aren’t many good mana items for his playstyle. If teams stack magic resist against you, you’re kinda stuck building into a Void Staff, which isn’t really all that great. I say Void Staff over Guise or Abyssal because they don’t provide enough benefit for the inventory slot. Obviously you can fit Archangel’s in there somewhere, but for the early game he really needs the survivability of the other items. As you stretch into late game Archangel’s becomes more of an option, but it’s definitely less useful as it likely won’t fully stack.

At first I had a problem with Spell Flux, and though it still seems really lackluster, it’s only there for the MR debuff. I wouldn’t mind seeing them bump his MR debuff, maybe scaling with AP, so that spell flux is a little more useful and you aren’t quite so limited on build. Of course, introducing new mana/spell pen items would also address the build issues.

On the whole, I’ve been having a lot of fun with the new Ryze. He’s much more active, and the mana scaling encourages him toward early survivability, something he desperately needs if he’s going to require more spellcasts for a kill.

Riot posted a patch preview for the upcoming Maokai patch, and though it wasn’t presented in video form this go round, we still got a lot of good information. At the top of the list, for me personally anyway, is that Vlad is getting a nerf.

You may remember Vladimir’s champion spotlight, if only because it was so funny to listen to Phreak tell us just how overpowered Vlad would be. Riot’s stance is that he’s not explicitly overpowered, which I can sort of agree with. Certain characters do very well against him, but a lot of toons don’t, and he snowballs way too fast with the bonus survivability he gets from his passive. His passive is getting a nerf, but probably more importantly so is Sanguine Pool. I’m excited, to say the least.

Anivia is catching a nerf to her annoying ult -> E combo, which is almost a guaranteed 25 percent damage done to her target with very little required effort. The change will make it cost more mana for players to ‘pulse’ her ult, quickly toggling it on and then off, hopefully reducing the number of times that simple combo can land. I don’t think this will be quite enough, but we’ll see.

Rammus is also getting nerfed, this time on his speed. Powerball bonus speed is down 15 percent. Again, I’m not entirely certain that this addresses his issues, but it should help. I can understand Riot’s resistance to nerfing tanks. There are relatively few tanks in the game – a heavy nerf to one tank makes the rest of the list look pretty sparse.

Lastly, Ryze is getting a long awaited rework. I’ve played a few Ryze games recently. He’s pretty fun if he gets farmed, but the mechanics on Spell Flux make him unreliable in lane. The change will make him a ranged caster-carry. His spells will have shorter cooldowns, longer range, lower base damage, and scale with mana as well as AP. I’m actually really excited to try him out, though I wonder how Spell Flux now works. If the bounce range wasn’t increased with the cast range he could still feel a little frustrating.

Some of the cooldown reduction items are getting a rework, but I’ll cover that in more detail once Riot releases the actual number changes.