K’Sante struggles on League of Legends launch despite pre-emptive buffs

K’Sante, the Pride of Nazumah, has struggled on his League of Legends launch. Despite receiving huge buffs on the PBE pre-emptively, he’s still fallen short of players’ mark, and more changes could be on the way depending on Season 13’s impact.

K’Sante, the long-awaited high-skill tank top laner, is finally in the hands of League of Legends players. Eager to try and master that high-skill ceiling, players have picked up the Pride of Nazumah in droves ⁠— without much success in the first week.

As it stands at the time of publishing, K’Sante boasts a 41.93% win rate across all ranks in his main role of top lane, according to LoLalytics. While it’s not as dismal as Yuumi’s 30% on launch, or as busted as Nilah and Zeri, players have felt like he is lacking in some capacity.

Numerous players have alluded to his high-skill cap as a reason for his win rate lagging behind. Because he’s quite hard to play around with that swap between Warden and Skirmisher, the limits are still being tested.

He was also massively buffed on the PBE within hours of players first getting their hands on him. Those changes were eventually pushed to live, but some feel there’s a ways to go yet in making him balanced.

According to the stats, players are finding much more success with tank builds around Sunfire Aegis and Frostfire Gauntlet than skirmisher-style ones with Divine Sunderer or Goredrinker. Given his base form is the more defensive one, this makes sense.

However, there’s a consideration to be had here: K’Sante has also been balanced around the upcoming tank item rework and top lane changes in League of Legends Season 13. Riot told Dexerto ahead of the Pride of Nazumah’s launch this was a particular pain point.

“K’Sante is a bit more resource heavy than our other tanks,” designer Jacob Crouch explained. “In his conversion from Warden to Skirmisher, he takes away from his tank stats and turns them into attack damage and lethal stats. He is someone you want to get gold on so the top lane changes influence him positively.

“The items expand the role and the capabilities of tanks’ interactions with the item system in exciting ways, but K’Sante does his own version of that ⁠— we’ve never had a skirmisher who could buy Sunfire Aegis before,” he continued. “Not only are we introducing new tank items, but we’re introducing a whole new way for them to interact with League of Legends.”

So Riot are holding out on any further buffs for the Pride of Nazumah until all this settles down. Nothing has been shipped onto the PBE ahead of League of Legends patch 12.22, which is when the Season 13 changes go live for preseason.

If K’Sante is still underperforming, then the developers will maybe consider helping him out. But until then, players still have a long road to climb in mastering the tank top. After all, it was never going to be easy with that ‘high-skill’ moniker.