In recent weeks, Ryze has been the champion most talked about by the gaming community. The reason is that Ryze is currently in a state of being too weak after the tank playstyle was “killed off”, and the most important item, Everfrost, was heavily nerfed. In summary, Ryze is facing numerous issues both in terms of damage and gameplay, resulting in an extremely low win rate for this champion.
However, instead of giving Ryze a comprehensive buff, Riot in patch 12.11 only slightly increased the damage of his E – Spell Flux ability. Since this is the second ability to be maxed after Q – Overload, the changes made by Riot have almost no impact on Ryze’s early game strength. This champion remains weak, currently standing at a win rate of 44.5%, which is an improvement over the previous patch but still places him at the bottom of the Mid Lane tier.
Clearly, when they issued a buff that was ineffective and left Ryze still bad, Riot naturally faced a lot of criticism. Consequently, Riot has released an emergency patch to strengthen both Ryze and Kog’Maw. Furthermore, the creators of League of Legends have slightly reduced the strength of Zeri and Olaf as they proved to be too strong at the time of patch 12.11’s release.
As we have seen, with the cooldown of Q – Overload reduced to 5 seconds and the base damage of E – Spell Flux increased, it will help Ryze clear waves a bit better in the early game. This, combined with an increased interaction rate with E’s skill damage, will allow Ryze to deal damage more effectively in the later stages. However, this direct stat buff only slightly strengthens Ryze, and the E-Q combo spam gameplay remains unchanged.
Perhaps at this point, these updates are the best Riot can do for Ryze with this skill set. If Riot truly wants the overall gameplay of Ryze to change and to move away from the E-Q combo spam, they will need to rework this character once again in the future.