Riot is nerfing its newest League champion hard and he hasn’t even been released

Declan Mclaughlin
hwei revealed at Worlds 2023

Riot Games is set to introduce its newest League of Legends champion Hwei on December 6 and the developer has already announced nerfs to him in the public test realm.

Riot revealed League’s newest champion, Hwei, during the World Championship Grand Final broadcast. He is advertised as the most complicated champion ever to be added to the game thanks to his many ability combinations.

The developer has even released a cheat sheet for players to understand the 10 different combinations of spells and abilities that Hwei can perform.

Because of his various abilities, Hwei will likely prove a nightmare for the game balance team to reign in if he ever becomes too powerful. Before his release, the champion has hit the public test realm for players to feel him out before he hits live servers in early December.

Thanks to PBE testing, Riot is nerfing Hwei before he even releases with changes to almost all of his abilities.

Riot nerfing Hwei before he hits live League servers

Champion designer Myles ‘Emizery’ Salholm took to the HweiMains subreddit to break down the nerfs coming in the next PBE patch.

Emizery outlined how Hwei’s base damage, AP scaling, and other aspects of his kit were all getting nerfed for most of his abilities.

Some aspects of Hwei’s kit are being buffed to compensate, like the AP ratio on his passive and some of his healing, shielding, and cooldowns. But the changes seem like an overall nerf to his damage and burst ability.

The comments on the post largely agree with the nerfs, however, the future Hwei mains seem to want more cooldown buffs or some kind of compensation for the blanket changes to his damage.

These changes might not even be the final product for the champion as Riot still has a few days to tinker with him before he hits the rift in Patch 13.24.