Wukong, after being reworked and having his skill set adjusted in patch 10.6, has truly transformed into a completely new champion. Not only has he become more robust and resilient, but this champion also contributes significantly to the overall team gameplay as a true Fighter, rather than building full Lethality like before. However, Wukong’s stats are currently overwhelming compared to other champions, even boasting the highest win rate in the top lane at 55.55%.
The strongest aspect of the new Wukong is his incredible resilience even without building tank items. His passive grants armor and healing, and it stacks too quickly to a high number, making it hard for most champions to deal enough damage to penetrate Wukong’s defensive stats early in the game. Perhaps Riot Games anticipated this, as just a few days after the release of patch 10.6, they launched a hotfix aimed at reducing the power of this monkey. Specifically:
Riot Mark Yetter: “We have a hotfix targeting Wukong that will be released this afternoon (US time). This champion is fun to play but needs a slight power reduction:
Passive – Iron Skin
Maximum stacks increased from 8 to 10.
Stacking amount reduced from 62.5% to 50% of base stats.
W – Decoy
Energy cost changed from 60 at all levels to 80-40 based on level.
Damage of the clone reduced from 50-70% to 40-60% of the original damage.
Basic healing every 5 seconds reduced from 5 to 4.
Interestingly, this update from Riot Games returns Wukong’s passive to be exactly like the first adjusted version (10 stacks and each stack providing 50% of the armor and healing from the passive). At that time, Riot received feedback that Wukong was too strong in the jungle due to the massive amount of armor and healing, allowing this monkey to farm the jungle with very little health loss.
They later changed it to the official version, reducing the maximum stacks but allowing for a significantly higher increase in stats, resulting in our “Great Sage” becoming an incredibly powerful Fighter in recent days. This change from Riot essentially only makes the stacking process of the passive take a little longer; Wukong remains extremely strong with his overwhelming armor and healing, capable of using his stats to dominate any opponent in lane.
You might see Wukong in the jungle more after the adjustments, but this monkey remains extremely strong in the top lane even with these nerfs.