We're making a few quality of life improvements to the Opening Encounter and stage 3 carousel.

Automata has been one of our most powerful Gold-tiered traits, with the Emblem providing so many defensive stats that it could make any carry, 6-cost or otherwise, too glorious to be balanced. Have you seen Ambessa or Warwick with this and a Bloodthirster!? Chem-Baron has been riding a bull market to the moon. We're decreasing the cashout rewards for 400 and 500 and shipping quite a few nerfs to the Perfected Items.

Putting the POW! in Powder and raising the power floor of 1-costs in general, with the exception of one chemist who's been on the run for too long.

Opening up more pathways for 2-cost carries Camille and Zeri to succeed while trimming back some of Renata's stall power and Ziggs' splash damage.

Giving Cassiopeia a net buff with more Attack Speed which will allow her to cast more often and scale better with items like Spear of Shojin and Nashor's Tooth. While Ranged Gangplank has been able to sail smoothly into many viable comps, melee Gangplank hasn't stayed afloat in the current meta. More healing and a harder-hitting AOE attack will suffice as a replacement for swim lessons here. We're buffing Smeech. It's Smeeching time.

Ekko's both hard to play as an AP-melee carry and a bit on the weaker side. More casts should help him dish out the damage, making the Omnivamp items you should be slamming on him even better. Elise (Ranged) and Twitch are the other two 4-costs that have been dragging behind Silco, Ambessa, Heimerdinger, etc. While they could find success, that success required near-perfect itemization and team composition.

Jayce's Hextech Forge was triggered too often by instantly casting when revived, allowing you to use it as both a proxy frontline and its intended effect. We're making adjustments that will require you to keep the Forge alive to continually benefit from its effect. We're giving some love to the 5-costs that are less appealing or recently indirectly nerfed (Malzahar's Automata vertical).

While Viktor has certainly enjoyed his time as the most glorious of the 6-costs, it's time for Warwick and Mel to compete for the title.

Dummify has been one of our worst-performing Augments, with the risk of dummifying your team not worth the reward of an additional frontline health pool. We're adding a lot more HP scaling per stage to make this dummy click into a big-brained play. Golemify (Gold) has suffered from a similar issue to a lesser degree. Lone Hero has effectively become the Lux/Vlad Champion Augment over the last couple of weeks, using Lux's shielding to stall fights into an overtime victory. We're disabling it for now but will have more changes to the Champions in the next patch. Arcane Retribution (Sorcerer) was an Augment that asked you to have your Sorcerers die to trigger an AOE of damage with their excess AP. With only one real Sorcerer frontliner (Vladimir), the Augment was unintuitive to play. We've opted to disable the Augment as running vertical Sorcerer, a trait with little frontline, is difficult enough as it is.While inconsistent, Artifactory can lead to some incredibly high power ceilings due to specific Artifact combos that feel unbeatable. While we will be addressing the root of some of those combos later on with a couple of Artifact nerfs, the ability to hit these combos with one Augment is still out of the power budget, even for a Prismatic Augment. One such Artifact is Suspicious Trenchcoat, which, combined with other Artifacts or specific items (Edge of Night), can become too powerful and provide a frustratingly high amount of untargetability. We'll be nerfing Suspicious Trenchcoat later on to account for the dark techs that have emerged with the Artifact, but in doing so, Dark Alley Dealings, which doesn't provide free access to the powerful combos, will be significantly nerfed. We're opting to remove the Augment as it won't be able to compete with other Prismatics.

Some items could item a bit harder.

Making Fishbones more appealing for AP users by shifting some of its AD into the generally better Attack Speed. The rest of the Artifacts on the list are receiving nerfs to keep them in line.

Buffing the worst performing and least picked Anomalies while bringing down our two best.

Small, like the voice telling me to save my Shimmer at sub 30 HP.