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Yet another patch and yet another delay in the Wukong rework finally hitting the live servers.
It has been months since Riot Games has announced that they will be tweaking the Monkey King’s kit and bring in more diversity to his play style. And after weeks of testing him out on the PBE, when he was finally set up for a launch in patch 10.3, Riot yet again sends him back to the drawing board.
The recent kit that was planned for him made him a hit and a miss. He lacked a lot of early-game playmaking tools, while his late-game was made incredibly strong where he can single-handedly carry games that were otherwise lost.
In the League of Legends PBE server tests, his victory rate was rather, let’s just call it ‘specific.’ In games that ended around the 25-30 minute mark, Wukong had a win rate of a measly 42%. While for games that went the full stretch to up to elder (approx 40 minutes), his win rate literally skyrockets to a whopping 58%.
The balance team did not want to release a champion that was weak early and overpowered late. So, Wukong’s changes were reverted to his previous state, and currently, in the PBE, Riot is tweaking with him a bit more.
The goals that Riot have towards improving Wukong’s kit and playmaking potential is rather simple. They want to give him more tools in the kit so that he can:
- Make more proactive plays during the laning phase.
- Be more fun to pick and play by both new players and Wukong one-tricks.
- Be more impactful in the early game, rather than wait an eternity for his items to kick in.
To make Wukong more fun, Riot has constantly been taking feedback from the fanbase as to how they can best solve this problem.
The two biggest complaints that players have currently with Wukong is his insane mana cost as well as his passive and ultimate, which a lot of players feel to be rather unsatisfactory,
So in the PBE, currently, Riot has modded the two abilities and gave him more powerful tools to work with. He now has an improved cyclone as well as a shield on his passive that focuses on helping his early game out.
His current PBE state looks like this:
Stats:
- Base HP decreased to 540 from 577.8
- Mana decreased to 265 from 265.84
- Base MR decreased to 28 from 32.1
- MP5 decreased to 8.04 from 8.042
- Strength of Stone (Passive):
- “Entering stealth or brush grants Wukong a shield equal to [40 (+10% of his maximum health)]. This effect can trigger every 16/14/12 seconds at levels 1/7/13.”
Crushing Blow (Q):
- Cooldown: 8/7/6/5/4 seconds
- Costs 30 Mana
- “Wukong’s next attack gains 125 extra range, deals 15/30/45/60/75 (+65% bonus AD) bonus physical damage and reduces the target’s armor by 10/15/20/25/30% for 4 seconds.”
Warrior Trickster (W):
- Cooldown: 22/20/18/16/14 seconds
- Costs 50/55/60/65/70 Mana
- “Wukong dashes towards the cursor and becomes Invisible for 1 second, leaving behind a stationary clone for 3 seconds. The clone attacks nearby enemies Wukong has recently damaged for 50/62.5/75/87.5/100% AD physical damage.”
- Stealth – “Invisible: Wukong can only be revealed by nearby enemy Turrets or True Sight.“
Nimbus Strike (E):
- Cooldown: 10 seconds
- Costs 40/45/50/55/60 Mana
- “Wukong dashes to an enemy, sending out clones that mimic the dash up to 2 additional enemies nearby. Each enemy struck takes 65/100/135/170/205 (+80% bAD) magic damage.
- After dashing to an enemy, Wukong gains 30/35/40/45/50% Attack Speed for 4 seconds.”
Cyclone (R):
- Cooldown: 120/105/90 seconds
- Costs 100 Mana
- “Wukong spins his staff around for 4 seconds, gaining 30/40/50% movement speed. While spinning, he deals (2.5/5.5/8.5% (+.1% per 10 total AD)% target max health) physical damage per second to nearby enemies and knocks them up for 1 second the first time they get hit.”
- Damage to monsters capped at a maximum of 200/400/600 at 6/11/16 physical damage per second.”
However, nothing is set in stone, and these changes are still being tweaked by Riot. But hopefully, they will be able to finalize on his final kit before 10.4 releases sometime later this month.
10.4 Release date
According to the Riot games patch schedule, patch 10.4 is set to officially release on February 20th and will follow the usual maintenance procedure and server downtime. Patch 10.4 is going to be a rather big one, with a lot of buffs, nerfs and tweaks for not just champions but for items and runes as well.
