Wild Rift devs roll out small update to nerf Ezreal and tweak leaderboard and matchmaking

It’s not exactly patch day for League of Legends: Wild Rift open beta, so getting a sudden balance tweak in-game came as a surprise to the community.

The Wild Rift devs aren’t exactly going to be calling this update a full-fledged patch, and players can take it as a small hotfix where Riot Games looked to nerf Ezreal, currently the most overpowered champion in the game.

We’re rolling out an update to address a few issues (more details below):📉 Ezreal nerf⚗️ Manamune/Muramana nerf🏆 Leaderboard changes🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Matchmaking adjustments pic.twitter.com/UCzagSRGlx

— League of Legends: Wild Rift (@wildrift) November 14, 2020

Apart from getting a direct nerf to his kit, Ezreal will also be getting an indirect one to his scaling, as both Manamune and Muramana, his core items, will be scaled down.

This sudden update comes in light of Wild Rift’s lead balance designer, Alex “Wav4Break” Huang’s, take on keeping the balance.

In the blog post, the dev goes over a lot of balancing goals for the game and suggests that:

“Since Wild Rift is a new game, most of the metrics available to us will be less reliable due to the relatively small sample size and competitive players still maturing their champion pools.”

He added that this means there is a larger risk that the precision of the devs’ changes may sometimes be off. In situations where they have lower confidence, they will make changes in the direction they think is correct, but perhaps by a lower amount.

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Ezreal nerfed; leaderboard and matchmaking tweaked in Wild Rift update

A) Ezreal Nerf

Ezreal has been an overpowered bully in Wild Rift for some time, and Riot is looking to bring “Ezreal’s hotshot laning down a notch.”

Mystic Shot (1)

• Damage: 20/65/100/135 to 20/55/90/125
• Total AD ratio: 1.2 to 1.1
• Mana: 25/30/35/40 to 30/35/40/45

Essence Flux (2)

• Mana restore: 60 plus cost of triggering ability to 60/70/80/90

Manamune/ Muramana

His core items will be getting a significant hit as well in terms of damage and late-game impact.

• Mana to AD conversion ratio: 2 percent to 1.5 percent

B) Changes to matchmaking and leaderboards

Image via Riot Games

The leaderboard system in Wild Rift was quite janky and inaccurate, so Riot will be adjusting it and bringing in some tweaks to better reflect the accurate percentiles of the best players from each region.

Moreover, matchmaking will also be getting some updates, and Riot said:

“Finally, we’re rolling out some adjustments to our matchmaking algorithm. We’ll be monitoring closely, but we’re looking to decrease matchmaking time and increase game quality overall.”

Matchmaking in Wild Rift has been unreliable at best, and high-tier players were getting queued with low-tier ones, even during ranked matches. So, Riot will be looking to change all of that with this update.