Tryndamere has spun his way to the top spot of the League of Legends food chain after Riot handed the champion huge buffs to his attack range in Patch 13.17.
Balancing can be a pretty difficult thing, especially when it comes to online gaming. This is definitely the case for League of Legends, which hosts 164 unique champions. Considering how each champion interacts with one another, the items and the current meta means the balance team at Riot has to think carefully when making changes.
Even the most minute of changes can have a cascading effect on game balance, which can completely throw the meta for a loop. This could be potentially disastrous for the game’s health and professional scene, so the devs have to be extra temperamental when implementing patches.
One example of this change is the massive swing in win rate the top lane Viking Tryndamere saw.
Tryndamere surges to Tier 1 after Patch 13.17 buffs
The most recent patch for League of Legends saw Tryndamere receive a nice buff to his attack range, going from 125 to 175. This doesn’t seem like a huge buff when looking at numbers, but a 50-attack range increase allows Trynd to stick more to his targets whilst viciously striking them.
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To accommodate for this change, Riot nerfed his attack damage down from 72 to 68 in the hopes he wouldn’t become too powerful.
However, it seems like this was nowhere near enough to stop Tryndamere from spiraling out of control. According to LoL stat website OP.GG, Tryndamere has now become a Tier 1 champion in both mid lane and top lane, with a whopping 53.91% win rate when played in mid at the time of writing.
Since it’s still early days for Patch 13.17, this may just be the offset of players learning how to fight against the new Tryndamere. If the Viking continues to stomp out other champions, Riot may need to revert the change or nerf him in another form to keep him in line.