As we know, a few days ago, Riot Games announced a highly notable experiment regarding the champion Pyke on the PBE server. Specifically, Pyke would gain 2 new features: first, the ability to instantly eliminate wards when allies are nearby. The second feature is that the kill threshold from the ultimate ability, Death from Below, would increase when Pyke uses this skill to take down champions, minions, or jungle monsters….
Immediately after this feature was tested on the PBE server, a wave of severe criticism emerged. The reason is that players believe these features only make Pyke a more toxic champion and do not help in eliminating his Mid Lane capabilities. In fact, the ability to eliminate wards made Pyke in the Mid Lane exert more map pressure when paired with a strong Jungler like Lee Sin or Xin Zhao, for instance.
Furthermore, the increase in kill threshold for the ultimate made Pyke’s playstyle become absurdly powerful. Typically, Assassins need to use their abilities wisely to take down opponents as quickly as possible. However, the new feature allows Pyke to eliminate enemies solely with his ultimate, while the other skills can miss. Clearly, this is something unreasonable that Riot should not have given to this champion.
As a result, Riot’s new features faced a barrage of criticism and extremely negative feedback. This compelled Riot Games to remove all the new features they tested for Pyke just about 2 days after implementation. As of now, Pyke on the PBE server has reverted to match the official version.
Perhaps this serves as another lesson for Riot in adding new features or attempting to balance a champion. It would be terrible if they made an already overpowered and unbalanced ability even stronger, which is utterly unreasonable.