Since his release, Pyke has always been a strong champion with extremely high volatility. From his basic abilities, Pyke possesses crowd control, can pick off enemies, and escape danger. With his ultimate dealing significant damage, executing targets, and sharing kill gold, Pyke has truly become a killing machine in League of Legends. Even after numerous nerfs to his damage stats, Pyke remains a dangerous champion.
It’s unclear why in their latest moves, Riot Games is buffing Pyke in patch 12.9. Specifically, Pyke’s ultimate, Death from Below, will increase the execute threshold for each successful kill with this ability. More precisely, the health threshold that a target can be executed will increase by 9 units for each champion kill or large monster, and 3 and 1 units for each melee and ranged minion kill, respectively.
This means that theoretically, the health threshold Pyke can reach for executing enemies could be in the thousands, allowing him to execute opponents instantly even if they are at full health. For instance, in an experiment by the “Bug Saint” Vandiril, he was able to execute a Cho’Gath with full 5000 health, as long as this champion had a sufficiently high stack.
In theory, this sounds great, but in practice, it’s quite difficult for Pyke to achieve this. The reason is that in a typical match, no matter how “fed” you are or how many kills you get with your ultimate, it usually only increases the execute threshold to about 200-300 health. However, that number is still enough for Pyke to take down several enemy champions over the course of the game.
Perhaps in the near future, Pyke will become a bit more popular and return to the meta as he has been overshadowed by tanky Support champions recently.