It’s only been a day, but League of Legends players are already calling for Master Yi nerfs as the Wuju Bladesman’s win rate soared by 10% since the launch of patch 12.13. He is now the best jungler in the game with 50% presence and a win rate above 56%.
Master Yi has flickered in and out of the League of Legends meta in the last few years. During the heyday of funnel meta, he was one of the best carries in the game — nigh on unkillable next to a Taric.
He slumped back into obscurity as the jungle meta evolved, but he quickly rose up again after League of Legends’ patch 12.10 durability update made his on-hit build laced with true damage incredibly strong.
He’s fluxed in and out in the patches since, but his LoL patch 12.13 buffs are the most drastic yet. Giving him increased damage reduction on his W, as well as a lower cooldown and increased auto attack range, he’s now much harder to kill.
All that and more has seen the Wuju Bladesman soar from one of the worst junglers in the game to definitively the best overnight. Master Yi now boasts a win rate above 56% at all ranks in LoL patch 12.13, with a 50% presence in games (16.28% pick rate, 32.78% ban rate).
This sharp increase is more than 10% from his absolute lowest following the durability update when his winrate fell to as low as 46%.
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The drastic swing in the other direction has got everyone pleading for nerfs. Even caster David ‘Phreak’ Turley can see the writing in the stars: “You have [a] very limited time to get extremely large amounts of LP by playing Master Yi until he is hotfix nerfed in about 12 hours.”
Master Yi players have resigned their fate to seeing a potential revert of the champion’s changes in LoL patch 12.13, or worse.
Riot has shipped some nerfs already: “We wanted to give him more optimizations to be more performant at higher levels of play and then move power from his more stat-checky elements after seeing how it landed, though we overshot,” developer Matt ‘Phroxzon’ Leung-Harrison said.
A hotfix has been pushed live as on July 13. We’ll keep you updated with the exact Master Yi nerfs once they’re made available.