Pyke sees changes to his passive in the League of Legends PBE, now provides allies gold from minions and wards

Riot seems to be experimenting quite a bit with Pyke in the League of Legends PBE, as the Bloodharbor Ripper sees a lot of changes made to his kit in the 12.9 patch cycle.

The developers had previously mentioned that the champion would be getting changes to his R, Death From Below, which did eventually make their way to the test server. Pyke now has infinite scaling on his ultimate, and its potency increases with every takedown that he gets, even if it’s not the ability itself that is securing the kill.

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It seems that Riot has added a new part to his passive, and Pyke is now capable of granting his teammates gold every time he “executes” a minion or a ward. This currently has a 50-second cooldown in the PBE, as Riot is still looking to tweak his kit further and make him more relevant in the current meta.

As these changes are rather experimental, it’s highly likely that the Pyke tweaks will not make their way to the official 12.9 update; when it does arrive, it will not exactly reflect the changes that the developers are introducing at the moment.

Riot Games is looking to get Pyke back into the League of Legends meta

There are indeed a lot of things the League of Legends developers are planning with Pyke’s kit as they look to make him a viable pick in the season 12 meta.

Pyke has been one of the many struggling supports this season and hardly got to enjoy much screen time in pro-play during the Spring Split. He was generally locked in by Fnatic’s Zdravets "Hylissang" Iliev Galabov as a pocket pick in the LEC, outside of which he didn't enjoy a proper stage presence.

His R initially received a lot of changes in the PBE, and his passive has now received some tweaks as well. Here is what Pyke’s passive looks like on the test server:

The Gift: If there is a nearby ally who's a champion, Pyke's basic attack will kill minions or wards and grant that ally the kill gold. This has a 50s cooldown.
The Drowned: Pyke stores 10% damage taken from champions. This is increased to 40% when there's more than one enemy nearby. Pyke can store up to 123 physical damage. And while unseen by enemies, he rapidly regenerates this stored damage.
Additionally, Pyke converts all Maximum Health increases to Attack Damage at a rate of 14 Health to Attack Damage.

The changes are rather experimental, and Riot will be testing them out thoroughly on the PBE server before shipping out the changes in the official patch.

While Pyke's tweaks (what many are also calling a mini-rework) are seen in the 12.9 cycle, it’s highly unlikely that they will be making their way to the game with the final update that is due to arrive in two weeks' time.