Significant Sion nerfs hits the League of Legends PBE 12.9 cycle, zombie does 50% less damage to towers

League of Legends patch 12.9 will be bringing in a significant number of balance updates to champions as Riot Games will be looking to mix things up in the competitive meta before the Summer Split kicks off.

Top lane “Inting Sion” has become one of the most annoying pick strategies to deal with in ranked and standard matchmaking. Here, players don’t have to do much more than pick Sion, repeatedly die in the lane, and use his zombie form to whittle down towers slowly, making it incredibly difficult to play against.

Due to this strategy, the opponent hardly gets to leave the lane, and if left unchecked, Sion could demolish all the enemy structures up to the top lane Inhibitor.

The League of Legends developers will be looking to scale this aspect of his passive down significantly in 12.9, and they have already introduced changes to his kit in the PBE to test it out on the server.

---

Sion passive nerfs hit the League of Legends PBE patch 12.9 cycle

The “Inting Sion” strategy has been in vogue for many seasons now. However, it grew significantly in popularity in Season 12, and solo-queue players have been abusing it to get free wins in ranked.

Since Riot Games is looking to scale this cheese down considerably, they have introduced nerfs to his passive in the PBE test server. As it stands now, Sion’s passive, Glory in Death, which turns him into a zombie after dying on the Rift, will now deal a reduced 50% damage to enemy towers.

However, dataminers have found this to be in the pre 5-minute mark in the game. Hence, turrets will have higher damage reduction early on while still making the “Inting Sion” strategy viable later on in the game.

This will prevent Sion players from purposefully dying at the start of the game to collect more gold from tower takedowns and plating by exploiting the MOBA’s new bounty system.

The strategy has no counterplay in the early game. Hence, the nerfs might make it considerably easier to deal with him and deny him the possibility of an early snowball.

However, it’s essential to keep in mind that the Sion changes hitting the League of Legends PBE are tentative, and Riot Games will first test things out on the server before shipping it in the official 12.9 patch. Hence, the changes made here might not be entirely reflected in the final update that’s due to arrive in two weeks’ time.