League of Legends dev says “our bad on this one” after insanely strong Aurelion Sol hotfix

A top League of Legends dev said that the recent changes to Aurelion Sol were mishandled and that the champion was now in a slightly stronger state.

Aurelion Sol has always been a bit of a problem child for Riot to balance. Before his rework, he had one of the lowest play rates in the game, due to a clunky kit and inconsistent power fantasy. After his rework, the star dragon got a bit more popular, but his newfound mobility and scaling has made him much harder to balance.

It doesn’t help that Aurelion Sol is one of the most important champions in the game’s lore. If he’s not in a good spot, what does that say about Runeterra as a whole?

But the most recent slate of changes, which resulted in Aurelion Sol getting a massive boost to the stacks he gets using his Q, pushed him so far up he needed to be hotfixed almost immediately.

Riot says “our bad” after series of Aurelion Sol buffs and nerfs

Posting a retrospective on some of the recent changes to League on Twitter, Lead Game Designer Riot Phroxzon said: “Asol – our bad on this one. Clearly we overshot on balance and we own that (underestimated how much the W buff did specifically). Post-nerf, we still believe Asol is stronger than pre-buff though.

“The impetus for the changes was honoring the desire of Asol players to be rewarded for proactivity in lane, but we realized post-ship that rewarding this with fragging power from W (rather than stacks that play into his scaling fantasy) was too statchecky and resulted in poor gameplay.”

He also said that the devs were looking at bot lane Maokai, who benefitted a lot from some of the new support items, as well as Illaoi and Wukong in the top lane.