This may be old news for some of you, but I didn’t notice it until today while I was playing Shaco. I Deceived over a wall to catch a low-health Ashe under her second turret. She saw me and moved away, though not before I could land a Two-Shiv on her. I was devastated to see that the spell wasn’t quite enough damage to drop her, especially since I was soaking so much turret fire to attempt the kill. Much to my surprise, she died just as she entered the fog of war. As she disappeared, I saw what looked like the burning animation from lizard buff.

I haven’t been able to find anything official from Riot regarding this change – it certainly wasn’t in Volibear’s patch notes – but it seems that this has been active since the most recent patch. I saw it today with Shaco, Nunu, Ryze, and Swain, though some of the threads I’ve found confirm that it is any single target spell.

This is a pretty huge change, one that further complicates the current jungle situation. Imagine giving lizard buff to Urgot at level two. Yeah, now his Q applies lizard. Have fun with that. How about Ryze? Katarina? LeBlanc? Kassadin? Kennen? Akali? Oh dear god, Akali. The problem, of course, is that it means the jungler is giving up a serious amount of XP early in the game. Unless he is ganking extremely well, passing off buffs isn’t really an option in the early game. Still, I always like to have more options than fewer, so I’ll call this “interesting” a the very least.

Had you already noticed the change?