Good News (or Bad News): AP Midlane Ezreal Changes Confirmed

Riot has confirmed a change coming to Runeglaive and Luden’s Echo that will hit AP midlane Ezreals.

This change was introduced in response to the interactions between a build path introduced in Patch 5.12 which allowed massive amounts of area of effect damage with Ezreal, a character that utilized a “poke” skillset that, when combined with said build path, would deal upwards of 70,000 damage from a single player in game.

A screenshot from a recent professional game. Notice the damage from the Ezreal (first portrait from top) significantly out damaging every other player.

While normally such damage is possible from damage-oriented champions, more often than not they are offset by a caveat of risks. Some examples of counterplay may include low cooldowns, high mana costs, or engaging the enemy head on in return for controlling the pace and direction of the fight.

Ezreal’s kit is designed for a “poke” style of gameplay, which relies on tossing out ranged attacks while possessing an escape mechanism that allows the champion to escape from most fights. Most of these poke champions possess inherent weaknesses or conditions in their kits that allow them to be counterplayed by their enemies, but the innate kit of Ezreal combined with the effects of the new build path largely allowed said champion to bypass such risks.

Shortly after the release of Patch 5.12, players from all regions quickly realized the power of this interaction and so began using this build path and the associated champion, causing friction and unrest within the League Of Legends player-base.

Tagged as “broken” by other players, Riot has quickly clarified that this interaction was unintended between the new item and existing items.

To clarify, it was definitely a bug we missed in development. Luden’s Echo will trigger on ‘spell damage’ which are damage sources that apply effects like the slow from Rylai’s Crystal Scepter or the spell vamp from Hextech Gunblade. ‘Proc damage’ doesn’t interact with those effects though, which is why Sunfire Cape doesn’t perma-slow when you also buy Rylai’s Crystal Scepter. Additionally, Luden’s doesn’t care about what type of damage is being applied, so Talon’s Rake and Olaf’s Reckless Swing would trigger the item’s effect if they ever had the item (please don’t try it with those champions in a real game though)…

Runeglaive was always intended to be treated as ‘proc damage’ just like Lichbane, Iceborn Gauntlet, Sunfire Cape, etc but the damage on the primary target was flagged incorrectly (the AoE damage was correctly flagged).

Fun Fact: the damage from Hextech Gunblade and Luden’s Echo are intended to apply spell effects. This means you could do things like shoot a champion with Gunblade, have Luden’s bounce off of them to three other targets, and heal off of the damage done to all four. If you had Rylai’s, they’d all be slowed too!

Edit: used the word ‘though’ too many times and it was bothering me…

Riot ricklessabandon,

replying to a post on Runeglaive no longer interacting with Luden’s Echo on the Public Beta Environment,  r/leagueoflegends

The exact nature of the changes have yet to be divulged by Riot, but the changes will likely be implemented in the next patch.

A discussion about AP Midlane Ezreal and Runeglaive interactions may be found here.

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