So, Riot just buffed the Baron without mentioning it in the patch notes?

needHymn·Jul 22, 2019·79 votes·22,344 views

I just tried to Solo a delicious 20 minute Baron with my beloved Nunu, just like I always do.

And I died.

Thankfully, it was in the practice tool, so no harm done. But I was like... wait what? I know exactly how capable Nunu is. So I was like, OH GREAT, Riot nerfed my Nunu and I missed it in the patch notes. Right?

So I look up Nunu's patch notes, nothing. Then I looked up the Baron's patch notes, nothing.

But eventually I figured it out. The Baron now has quite a bit of HP regen. It's a pretty significant buff. Be careful out there everyone, Riot's making changes and not telling nobody.

45 Comments

Sona PingJul 22, 201956 votes

To be fair, there's been a lot of changes on 9.14 that no one was told about (including Riot.)

Sewer SideJul 22, 201928 votes

I just went against a Nidalee who secured Rift Herald at 14 mins and was able to crush the Eye at 29 minutes into the game.

9.14 is a messy patch

ÈvilMortyJul 22, 201932 votes

Good im tired of 20min barons that go down in 5 seconds

NY64Jul 23, 20191 votes

So I guess baron is getting one shot now, people are not joking when they say damage is too high.

AirKingNeoJul 23, 20194 votes

not one shot, but mowed down.

DurzakaJul 24, 20191 votes

not one shot.

But if a team is ahead and got a mountain drake, Baron can be absolutely melted right at 20 minutes.

I still think its mountain drakes fault tho, not anything else.

SingedOTPJul 24, 20191 votes

Mountain Drake is best drake.

bluefire mark 2Jul 22, 201924 votes

Honestly I'd be happy if baron got buffed. Its literally way too easy to take it nowadays. Epic monster? I mean it harsly even has the potential to kill dragons by itself... and most champs can 1v1 a dragon... I'd love it if baron was buffed so it wasn't a "we aced them at 20 minutes so baron is ours garunteed even though we're all almost dead." Whether it be more regen, more damage, more unique abilities, something else, or multiple of these, baron should be buffed.

SaygariJul 22, 201914 votes

and thats a good thing, im very happy cause baron is way too easy to take at 20 minutes, no reason any champ should be allowed to solo an extremely important objective at 20 minutes.

Zero ShingetsuJul 22, 201910 votes

Beloved, eh?

Anyway, apparently they didn't buff it enough. Yi can still solo it at 26 or so.

Ryujin KikugoroJul 23, 20191 votes

Yi can solo it at 23 minutes if he has 3 items (bloodrazor,rageblade and botrk) ;) MasterYi

8oz Cream CheeseJul 22, 201910 votes

The patch has had a lot of bugs, this is probably just another bug.

AidanWRJul 22, 20196 votes

They changed Sivir pretty differently a few patches back so that her w will now bounce to targets she doesn't have vision of, and never told anyone

SillaeJul 23, 20191 votes

{quoted}

They changed Sivir pretty differently a few patches back so that her w will now bounce to targets she doesn't have vision of, and never told anyone

Yeah I noticed when I was playing Evelynn. Made it really annoying to sneak up on.

AidanWRJul 23, 20191 votes

It was definitely needed though, because if she would use her w on an incoming minion wave, it would just miss 2-3 minions because she didn't have vision, and it made it consistent with other bounce effects like Brand ult and Fiddle e

alfavhunterJul 22, 20195 votes

How to change baron

Baron Regen increased by 50%

Baron now takes 75% less damage from all sources, reduced by 15% per enemy champion in combat with it down to 0% bonus damage reduction. (So 1 man vs baron it takes 60% less damage)

This means it's noticably difficult to kill with less than a full team helping to take it out.

ThatGuyFTPJul 23, 20191 votes

Erm... I think there's something a bit wrong with your math there bud... 75 - 15 is NOT 50

alfavhunterJul 23, 20191 votes

{quoted}

Erm... I think there's something a bit wrong with your math there bud... 75 - 15 is NOT 50

Didn't notice I hit 5 instead of 6, sorry

SonicÐeHedgedawgJul 23, 20191 votes

{quoted}

How to change baron

Baron Regen increased by 50%

Baron now takes 75% less damage from all sources, reduced by 15% per enemy champion in combat with it down to 0% bonus damage reduction. (So 1 man vs baron it takes 60% less damage)

This means it's noticably difficult to kill with less than a full team helping to take it out.

Proper Baron taking often requires a lookout. This discourages that. Taking Baron after a 5-2 team wipe is also supposed to be pretty standard. This, likewise, discourages that.

I get not wanting 1 or 2 champs to be able to solo Baron alone, but it's not necessarily SUPPOSED to be a 5 man objective, and if you balance it for the 3 man situation, but continue scaling it down for 4 and 5 man, you make 5 man Baron sneaks trivially easy

alfavhunterJul 24, 20191 votes

{quoted}

Proper Baron taking often requires a lookout. This discourages that. Taking Baron after a 5-2 team wipe is also supposed to be pretty standard. This, likewise, discourages that.

I get not wanting 1 or 2 champs to be able to solo Baron alone, but it's not necessarily SUPPOSED to be a 5 man objective, and if you balance it for the 3 man situation, but continue scaling it down for 4 and 5 man, you make 5 man Baron sneaks trivially easy

Baron would still be doable by 2-3 champions, just not as easy. And it would take more time to do it.

This actually just adds more counterplay

And scouting would still work, as players can hit baron once, then go scout. They would still be in combat with baron for the normal "in combat" timer.

This change would also make having a jungle there for the baron smite more valuable as it is harder to steal vs smite because smite is true damage and thus not reduced by the change in suggesting even if trying to solo baron.

The idea behind the suggestion wasn't just to make baron itself harder to kill, but to add more counterplay with a higher priority on true damage for finishing blows on it.

KnKitsuneJul 22, 20194 votes

Honestly, Baron and Dragon needed a buff.

Garen is adoptedJul 23, 20193 votes

Nothing new, this game is slowly dying, mark my words, at the worst in 2022 this game will be completly dead.

Altonius AmakiirJul 23, 20194 votes

You know, last year I wouldn't have believed you. But with the monetization they're pulling, the lack of significant changes each patch, the bugs, and just the overall lack of communication (both in notes and in community interaction) I think you've got a point.

TheGrandaoJul 23, 20191 votes

I mean, to be fair it’s understandable that the game is so difficult to balance and crunch bugs man, we have a shit ton of champs+ a lot of items. It’s almost impossible to not break something or make a champ broken. You can’t predict all the effects that a big fix is going to cause. With that in mind, I think the game is as balanced as it can Ben

Altonius AmakiirJul 25, 20191 votes

You've never done programing in your life, have you? The only reason they would have to worry about something like that is if they had interdependencies of abilities between champions or messed with the base code. In other words spaghetti code or someone messed up in changing how a stun works for all champions. In the first case, it's bad programming (and it's worth noting they've done multiple passes through their programs to rewrite their spaghetti code over the past few years; most recently with Mord). Second case is unfortunate, and it's something we saw this recent patch. They rewrote a lot of base game functions and a lot of things went wrong from it.

Normally such things would be understandable, but with the scale of it this patch, that tells us they didn't do proper QA of it. As for regular bugs sitting in the game for a long time, most of that is small-scale spaghetti code probably. In fact all the champion bugs I keep listed on my computer would fall under that. So, again, normally it would be understandable. It takes a lot of time to sort through that. What isn't understandable is why it's been passed over on priority for so long when some of them are high impact bugs. Some of these bugs have a high impact for gameplay, feel of the champ, or both with high replication rates and they've been around for YEARS.

They haven't been doing big changes this year. Almost all their changes are low in time/resources that they've done so far this year (at least in terms of programming). So they should have had spare resources to put towards bug fixing. Not asking/expecting a lot, but over the course of a year three extra people could have done a lot to reduce the bugs in the game, especially the higher impact/standing ones. So where are these resources? What are they being used for that's so important? To me it looks like it's been monetizable items and TFT. Both of which don't completely cover the extra resources they should have.

Again, 3 people isn't a lot. But they should have a bit more than that assuming they haven't downsized and based off what they've been able to undertake in years past. In actuality they've been hiring this year, so they should have even more than I expect. That brings us back to the point. What do they have these people working on? They've essentially pulled resources from balance with some going to income, and some going to TFT; the rest is either working on something to be revealed, or they've horribly mismanaged their resources somewhere.

TLDR: The program/amount of code isn't an excuse, coding is not nearly as complicated and code is not as nearly intertwined as you think. And I'm annoyed because they're pulling resources from balance and not putting enough back into bug fixes and champion vgus/releases (of which I currently care about bug fixes more).

CrashyyJul 23, 20193 votes

They removed Sion's 'e' counting as 2 abilities without mentioning it too.

Dasdi96Jul 22, 20192 votes

Did you not have any mountain drake buffs?

PermaBannedXDDJul 22, 20192 votes

Lol so you complain, because you can't solo Baron.... In practice tool.... 😂

CyanSolution247Jul 23, 20192 votes

{quoted}

Lol so you complain, because you can't solo Baron.... In practice tool.... 😂

As nunu, in my opinion, the only champion who should be able to solo at 20

FriendmakerJul 26, 20191 votes

No champion should be able to solo baron without a mountain drake. Jungle Yorick can do it if you have a mountain drake at 20 minutes. Idk if nunu has to have drake, but my point stands. A tank should not be able to deal enough damage to a baron to solo it without a mountain drake.

CyanSolution247Jul 27, 20191 votes

{quoted}

No champion should be able to solo baron without a mountain drake. Jungle Yorick can do it if you have a mountain drake at 20 minutes. Idk if nunu has to have drake, but my point stands. A tank should not be able to deal enough damage to a baron to solo it without a mountain drake.

Just so that you know the way mountain drake works is that it converts a % of your damage against objectives into true dmg. Nunu has a q that does 100% true damage against minions and monsters, this is the majority of his damage output against monsters.

Nunu's entire gimmick was that he has an ability that is better than smite but useless against champions. He has since been reworked so that his q can target champions as well but thankfully does not deal 980 true dmg to champs. Nunu's Q does less damage and heals him for less when he targets champs so he should be quite strong versus the titans of the rift (Elder/Rift/Baron) also when Nunu has less than 50% hp his Q heal is 50% stronger.

Lets test nunu with the following rules: (No dragons) (No Potions) (1 smite) (no blue or red buffs) In my last game at 20 minutes, I had Cinderhulk, Spirits Visage and Ninja Tabis, and was sitting at 21% cdr (lvl 11). I assume this build is ok for the test?

After a long dance with Rift-herald my duel with baron began... Everything was going smoothly until mid-fight my health became low with no Q in sight. So I decided to smite. The Beasts health went low so Willump landed the killing blow.

So as you can see nunu can in fact solo baron with the right runes and items but the question remains should he? let us look at some other champions with exceptional abilities Ivern can mark and smite jungle camps effectively 1 shoting the camp. Ornn can give his ally's upgrades to their items. Victor doesn't need 6 items because he brought his own. Pyke and Draven can both easily break leagues economy. Ziggs can execute towers from 35%. yasuo can go 0/11/0 to hit his power spike. and I think Sylas and Neeko are giving everyone an identity crisis.

SweedishGunnerJul 23, 20192 votes

It's probably another bug but it sounds like a change for the better. Baron and Elder Dragon are complete pushovers.

QueenAquaJul 23, 20192 votes

I wouldn't be surprised if this was a bug. Pbe was filled to the brim with some pretty stupid bugs (i.e. Infinite nunu q's, infinite shaco q's, infinite wu q's, etc) and riot didn't fix them on pbe til after they released the next patch live. And look what happened. The last patch practically broke the game. Yeah they fixed some of the bugs that were on pbe when it hit live, but if they had fixed them while they were still in pbe, the other bugs that popped up might have been caught a lot sooner, esp since its possible that these bugs were a result of fixing the other ones. Riot should really start paying attention to pbe, it's what it's there for. This is why people stopped trying to test, because it isn't making a difference on the live servers

dupie17Jul 22, 20191 votes

I'm fine with Baron being buffed, but I don't think that health Regen is the right way to go about it. Smite fights are already tedious enough. There are a boatload of champions who can easily outsmite Smite, and the objectives can level up mid combat (I don't think this was ever fixed). Having such an important objective be so volatile is really problematic, and Regen adds yet another layer of difficulty when trying to secure the objective with Smite or whatever tool you happen to have.

General Esdeath Jul 22, 20191 votes

One of the biggest things I noticed Riot never mentioned is Qiyana W giving her enhanced AA range, it's written NOWHERE in her tool tip.

MurkSmittyJul 23, 2019

Might not be written but it surly was said cause I was aware of that

General Esdeath Jul 23, 20191 votes

{quoted}

Might not be written but it surly was said cause I was aware of that

It doesn't say it anywhere. If you play her you tend to realize it if you start Q level 1 and then at lv 2 suddenly notice you have more range.

MurkSmittyAug 4, 20191 votes

watch the champ spotlight they say it in the video

General Esdeath Aug 5, 20191 votes

"Qiyana dashes a short distance and pulls 1 of 3 elements into her weapon. Water, stone, or grass. With an element equipped, her attacks hit stronger and her movement speed increases near the source of that element"

That's her W on the champion spotlight, it doesn't mention AA the range anywhere

Baconmaster116Jul 22, 20191 votes

Honestly at the start of 9.14 i was wondering who got fired considering several champs were disabled and annies win rate jumped to number 1

astralwitJul 23, 20191 votes

Ekko has a weird W bug that shows his clone even when you cast from an unwarded bush. This was never mentioned in patch notes and it's a pretty massive nerf in specific spots.

BuffaloJugglerJul 23, 20191 votes

Even after heavy watchful eye of TahmKench

He's missing clarity. His passive needs to be a timer on the hotbar like Darius bleed so you know exactly when the stacks fall off for counterplay.

inSęcJul 23, 20191 votes

That moment when players can't see that Baron has always had incredibly high HP regen as long as I can remember that's why a Baron is 400hp and a support and tank top laner just can't kill it after a fight