Recently, League of Legends has witnessed a rather strange meta where many Top Lane champions have started using the Hammer of Justice despite not splitting push at all. This trend has become so strong that numerous players in top-tier tournaments like LCK and LPL have continuously abused the Hammer of Justice over the past few weeks. This has left gamers feeling fed up, and even League of Legends experts have been left speechless by Riot when seeing this meta.
Perhaps due to receiving all kinds of criticism from the community, Riot has had to step in to adjust this seemingly useless but actually very strong item. Specifically, in the latest announcement from Riot Phlox, they will reduce the passive power of the Hammer of Justice by half on ranged champions. This promises to prevent characters like Jayce and Graves from abusing this item in the future. Additionally, Riot has also promised to directly buff Urgot to compensate since this champion is too weak without this item.
Looking at this change, it is clear that the Hammer of Justice will indeed become much weaker on ranged champions. However, for other characters like Renekton, Fiora, or even Rek’Sai, this item will still be just as powerful, and the aforementioned nerf will not affect them at all. It would not be surprising if the names mentioned above continue to abuse the Hammer of Justice in the upcoming patch 12.5.
The biggest issue with this item is that it provides too much health and attack damage for a very low price of 2800 gold. In fact, when considering the health or attack damage stats alone, the Trinity Force or the Divine Sunderer do not provide as much power as the Hammer of Justice, even though they are much more expensive. With such a high power threshold, the trade-off for defensive stats in the passive is completely acceptable.
Therefore, Riot should find another balancing direction instead of nerfing the passive of the Hammer of Justice. For example, reducing the health and attack damage stats added from this item while slightly increasing the power of the passive to encourage split-pushing playstyle. This would help the Hammer of Justice return to its intended purpose of serving strong split-pushing champions instead of becoming an item that provides too many stats and is abused as it is now.
