The last few updates for League of Legends have been pretty low-key, purely because the World Championship is just around the corner, and Riot don’t want to shuffle the MOBA’s meta around too much. Patch 6.18 is more or less the same as those others, except for the fact that it features a reworked champion.
Welcome to Patch 6.18, the one that Worlds will be played on. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been a year since our last clash of fates, but we’re hard at work putting the finishing touches on the balance state to give teams an ideal environment to rise to the occasion.
Speaking of that balance state – as you can guess, the majority of these changes are aimed at professional play. Given how teams are adapting to the resurgence of standard lanes, we’re committed to tossing love to some old favorites (MF, Lux) and taking down some powerhouses (Vladimir, Gnar) in order to give folks the wiggle room necessary to experiment. While the ‘worlds meta’ usually shakes out over the course of the tournament itself, we feel it’s important to give teams options – and so a lot of our work and goals from 6.17 carry over here.
Pros aren’t the only ones having fun – after years of being forgotten, Yorick Mori’s been remembered in an all-new update looking to spook the flesh right off your bones. Sporting a new entourage of brain-hungry undead minions and a very complicated relationship with the concept of death, Yorick’s ready to shamble his way into a side-lane near you and get to shoveling some fools. When we said pros aren’t the only ones having fun, we meant it – Yorick’s disabled for Worlds on account of being fresh-off-the-press. I’m sure he’ll be okay.
The highlight of patch 6.18 is of course, Yorick. He won’t be available to the pros in worlds unfortunately. He will be for everybody else though! Here’s his champion spotlight, along with a breakdown of his abilities:
Yorick can have up to four Mist Walkers in his service at once. Mist Walkers instantly die if they move too far from either Yorick or the Maiden of the Mist. A grave is occasionally created when enemy minions or neutral monsters die near Yorick, and all enemy champions that die near him leave a grave.
Yorick’s next basic attack deals bonus damage and restores some health. If Last Rites kills a target, it creates a grave. If there are at least three graves nearby and Last Rites is on cooldown, Yorick can instead cast Awakening to raise Mist Walkers from the graves.
Yorick summons a destructible wall of corpses that encircles a target area for a few seconds.
Yorick hurls a globule of Mist that deals magic damage, applies a slow, and marks a target. Yorick and Mist Walkers get a movement bonus when heading toward marked targets.
Yorick summons the Maiden of the Mist (at higher ranks, she’ll bring some Mist Walkers with her). The Maiden moves and attacks on her own. When Yorick attacks the Maiden’s target, he’ll deal bonus magic damage based on the enemy’s maximum health.
Not once did I play the original Yorick, so I can’t really comment on whether his new kit vastly differs to his old one or not. What I can definitely see though, is his potential to annoy opponents with his ability to split push:
When both side lanes are unoccupied, the Shepherd has a chance to show off the most unusual ability in his kit: splitpushing two lanes at once. It works like this: the Maiden of the Mist is fairly intelligent by AI-companion standards, and she’ll continue to push a lane even if Yorick is no longer there. He can plop the Maiden into top lane, then TP down south to splitpush bot lane on his own.
With adequate distance between the two, both are free to raise their own armies of Mist Walkers, up to four each, and push down two lanes at once (so long as the rest of your team can just hold mid for one minute). Of course, Yorick’s a lot weaker without his ghoulish sidekick, so split wisely.
Anyhow, Yorick isn’t the only important feature of patch 6.18. There are the usual tweaks and such too. You can read through them in all their glorious detail right here, or you can watch this video instead, which recaps all the important stuff in under 13 minutes.
Remember, patch 6.18 is the last significant League of Legends update you’ll see for a while. Worlds kicks off at the end of this month, on September 29th, and will be running through until the final on the 29th of October. Will you be following all the action?
Last Updated: September 8, 2016
