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The Ekko nerfs are a joke

XYGSYS·2/4/2020, 6:29:48 PM·93 votes·42,528 views

Wow after these nerfs I don't think Ekko will even be playable. Thankfully they didn't give him -5 base move speed, otherwise he'd be totally dead.

Seriously though, how many Ekko mains are on the balance team? This guy has been an S tier jungler for a very long time, and this is how they nerf him? I am sure having 0.25 less seconds of cc is going to keep him from one-shotting people. I would much rather see damage nerfs, or an ult CD nerf. Why is his ult on a 50 second cooldown at rank 3? That is absurd. With only 20% CDR he is down to 40 seconds. It would be nice if you had a window to kill him, but thanks to a minuscule CD and plenty of CDR available he will only die if he makes a terrible mistake, or if you can somehow kill him twice in 40 seconds. Even before rank 3 on his ult it isn't a very long cooldown. Sure, his jungle clear will be hurt a little by the attack speed, but I don't think that nerf is even close to enough.

Edit: I posted this before the patch was released, so I was going off of the pbe. Even with what the real nerf is, I don't think it does enough. The damage he will lose in his early clear, where it is more important, will be pretty low. I don't think this nerf will make a giant impact.

74 Comments

IVSakenz2/4/2020, 6:46:53 PM55 votes

The balance team is a complete joke from top to bottom.

The Bad Touch2/4/2020, 9:08:36 PM24 votes

Better voice any complaints in Chinese... or they won't be read.

ChiefDovahkin2/4/2020, 10:52:17 PM15 votes

Funny bc I literally looked at the nerfs and said lol Ekko still gonna be my go to jungler. These nerfs don't even remotely touch his strengths. He's been overpowered ever since they made his combo reliable and his ult is always up.

Vonyalo2/4/2020, 6:38:18 PM14 votes

Better nerf that Sona we see in every single ga.... oh wait

The Flashless2/4/2020, 7:15:07 PM11 votes

The boards once again proving its ignorance. Firstly, no Ekko mains liked those nerfs because it hit Mid just as hard as Jungle. Secondly, those nerfs were scrapped in exchange for his passive doing 150% DMG to monsters instead of 200%. Lastly, it was actually the W's stun buff that put Ekko over the edge rather than the ult buff.

Emperør Rhaast2/4/2020, 10:52:59 PM10 votes

Lol.

Ekko is an assassin. He is supposed to have a lot of damage. The buffs that pushed him from balanced to overpowered, were not buffs to his damage.

Patch 7.21: His passive was buffed to deal double damage to monsters, pushing jungle Ekko to be a somewhat meta pick.

Patch 7.22: Base armor, base hp, and hp growth buffed.

Patch 8.2: +10% attack speed at level 1.

Patch 9.9: Base AD increased. E mana cost decreased.

Patch 9.11: QoL buff to his E.

Patch 9.16: E base damage increased. R cooldown decreased.

Patch 9.18: W mana cost reduced. W stun duration increased to 2.25 seconds, from 1.75 seconds.

These are all the buffs Ekko has received since preseason 8 - there are too many of them I'm well aware.

There are 2 buffs here that made Ekko jungle so damn powerful, and that made him feel so overbearing as a champion. That is, the buffs to his R cooldown and W stun duration.

From 1.75 seconds to 2.25 seconds is a pretty big increase. With a cc that large, that lasts that long, it made Ekko's ganks very powerful. The whole reason he started being played jungle. The thing is, these buffs came from nowhere (to sell his new skin most likely). Ekko was fine before.

I think these nerfs will be just fine to push him out of jungle, or make him less viable at least. Ekko's early clear is already poor; by making his clear slower and unhealthier it'll open up more chances for the enemy jungler to invade him and set him behind.

Reverting the buffs to his W and R would be enough. They don't need to gut his damage - his damage was barely touched in the first place, other than a buff to his E base damage and his base AD. Unless you get caught off guard by his W or somehow get slowed by his Q, it's pretty difficult for Ekko to get on top of an adc unless the adc is brain damaged enough to stand on his ultimate clone. Not to mention that Ekko has a massive downside - the enemy team can see when his ult is off cooldown.

Don't nerf his damage. Please. That will just hurt mid lane ekko. Leave mid ekko alone - push him out of jungle.

xDogMeatx2/4/2020, 8:05:50 PM8 votes

ur right that is a joke because his jungle clearing is not the issue the main issue is the fact he can do almost everything.

FSRER2/4/2020, 7:03:08 PM8 votes

Or...you know...could make his W no longer stun non-epic monsters and make his passive have a longer cooldown on non-epic monsters which would make him non-god tier but you know....Riot full r%%%%% video games back at it again

KingCheeseburger2/5/2020, 11:49:41 AM8 votes

How dare you argue with 200 years of experience!

Kendren12/5/2020, 3:19:59 AM6 votes

Riot Balance Team: You can... NERF damage?... fk

Tormentula2/5/2020, 12:18:29 AM5 votes

The only nerf i'm seeing if i'm not mistaking is the damage to monsters being lowered from 200% to 150%

https://na.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/game-updates/patch-10-3-notes/

Which is actually fairly big because the only reason ekko jungle even spiked in the first place was because they buffed his passive damage to monsters in addition to increasing the stun on his W.

As for why this is big, it slows his early jungle clear down quite a bit. He'll get outpaced by a lot of other junglers (if not just on the same level) and take an addition auto attack or 2 per camp making him more prone to counter ganks and invades. Slower clears = less healthy clears (imagine doing krugs, wolves, and raptors, he's doing 50% less passive damage to all units of those camps).

Probably not enough of a nerf but we shouldn't pretend like the current nerf is a joke when it actually hits him.

Revech2/5/2020, 10:14:36 AM5 votes

Stop trying to defend a broken champ because you got to stomp freelo out of him for an ungodly amount of time. The stat's don't lie. All this does is force Ekko into other roles that he's more suitable for and probably was originally designed for.

ÈvilMorty2/6/2020, 2:11:16 AM5 votes

one of my recent games, the only way to kill the enemy ekko (who was ahead by maybe half an item) was to sit in a bush wait for him to walk up, cc lock and burst him with 3 of us. Which is exactly what we did. No champion should need that much attention in order to kill who isnt insanely far ahead.

Wordson1x2/4/2020, 11:55:11 PM5 votes

I'm so sick of seeing Ekko. Please get him out of this game.

Bardmageddon2/5/2020, 8:02:05 AM4 votes

200% reduced to 150% against monsters.....

The balance team is actually fucking with us at this point

Kintama2/5/2020, 8:28:41 AM3 votes

Ekko nerfs are a joke? what about diana nerfs or every other champ? 4 dmg per orb.
Leona ''Nerf''. Nautilus Q indicator never getting fixed.

Futaba Sakura22/5/2020, 12:04:41 PM3 votes

Let's go nerf his clear power because clearly thats the real issue the champ has. /s

Karfuss2/5/2020, 6:22:43 PM3 votes

His passive and his CC should not be functioning on Jungle monsters, which is giving him a much faster and safer clear than even champions like Shyvana.

At least ONE of them has to go, and if getting rid of both means he is nerfed out of the Jungle and back into Mid/Top where he should rightly be... So be it. It wouldn't be the first time a champion has found success elsewhere and subsequently pried out of that role. cough Lulu cough Sona cough Soraka cough.

Jazzchimera2/7/2020, 10:55:18 PM3 votes

The thing is that it´s new people who works on the balance team. Its prob not the same people who patched the game 5 years ago. That´s why they keep making the same mistake over and over again. As far as Ekko, problem is that he´s able do to quick damage in a short amout of second. he suck´s early game, especially from a few years ago when he was picked as a tank. but they nerfed his base damage and increased his ap ratio. Now he plays in jung, without fighting any lane opponent, has good gank with W and is able to E teleport to the adc Q AA and Ult away. On top of that he has hourglass which is broken as fck atm.

Baby Ghoul2/7/2020, 2:30:39 AM2 votes

Ekko will always be problematic because they designed his kit around erasing mistakes.

For an assassin, that's really a poor choice. Their mistakes should matter above all other classes because if you make one mistake against them, you're dead. But even if you don't make a mistake against Ekko, you're dead.

Its Moxie2/9/2020, 5:24:17 AM2 votes

You can't nerf an assassin's damage. They're meant to assassinate you, that's kind of the whole point. Nerfing his utility is much more viable. (But they could have done more)

People must have forgotten what made him so strong in the first place. They buffed his stun duration to 2.5 seconds. They never touched his damage numbers., think about it.

Kadexe2/5/2020, 6:47:52 PM2 votes

Dealing less damage to monsters means it takes him longer to kill them. This affects everything a jungler does - he'll have less health to gank with, he'll need to spend more time farming to keep up in gold+xp, and he'll take dragons/heralds less quickly.

Smµrfette2/5/2020, 6:29:48 PM1 votes

Uhm? The patch notes says his passive damage to jungle monsters was dropped 50%? What are you guys seeing?

Hexs Fortune2/10/2020, 6:47:38 PM1 votes

Would you guys accept an ekko mid buff to compensate some of the jungle nerfs suggested in this thread?

Nithke2/9/2020, 6:55:40 PM1 votes

Wouldn't know I only play it mid, don't really like metaslavin