Earlier this week, Riot Games’ Jeevan Sidhu confirmed on Twitter that Lucian will undergo certain changes in League of Legends’ PBE for version 11.17. These changes aim to enable a shift from mid to bottom lane, Lucian. These changes will be available on the LoL PBE today and mainly focus on his damage output in the solo lane as well as the damage gained from using his Culling (R).
All changes to Lucian in League of Legends PBE
- Base AD: 64 to 62
- Lightslinger (P)
(New) – Ally buffs empower Lucian’s next 2 (stacks to 4) basic attacks to deal an additional 14 (+10% tAD) magic damage - Ardent Blaze (W)
- Mana Cost 70 to 60
- Allies proccing the mark also trigger Vigilance.
- The Culling(R)
- Damage per shot: 20/40/60 (+25 percent AD) to 15/30/45 (+25 percent AD)
- Number of shoes: 22/28/34 to 22 (+25 percent critical strike chance)
The explanation behind the champion’s changes
Riot’s Associate Game Designer Tim “Truexy” Jiang gave some insight on why these Lucian changes were happening in a Quick Gameplay Thoughts post. For him, it is about giving Lucian more tools to “help him feel better about heading to the bot lane while still sticking close to his independent, gunslinger identity.”
Lucian was created to be a powerful bottom lane champion. However, the past few seasons have seen the Sentinels of Light member become more powerful in the mid lane. But his high pick and ban rate has not translated to a high win rate in that role recently. An example of this was seen in  Patch 11.6 where Lucian had a 45.4% win rate.
Despite having a lower win rate in the mid lane and weak regular play this season, a lot of professional players still prefer to pick or ban Lucian mid. In order to make the changes, Truexy stated that they “wanted to fully understand why Pros value Lucian Mid so much, despite his weak performance in the regular play.”
After finding out why pros preferred Lucian in mid, Truexy said that the team sought to give the champion “more power in bot without Lucian mid and Lucian top dominating pro play.” He further stated that they “were not aiming to reinvent the wheel and create complex rules and hooks that take away from Lucian’s core appeal”.
They decided to grant Lucian bonus damage through ally buffs to allow supports to help bot lane Lucian bully enemies in the early game. Additionally, shifting the champion’s Culling scaling to item based is to curtail his early game kill threat in mid lane. This will ensure bot Lucian have a faster spike in ultimate damages.
The changes to Lucian will be available on PBE today and later in League of Legends Patch 11.17 scheduled for release on August 25.
