What exactly are Olaf’s upcoming fixes for LoL looking like?
League of Legends designers generally share their plans with players about reworks of individual champions relatively early. Recently, fans could find out that Riot is working on Taliyah and Olaf, and later Swain joined the two.
Even though Swain’s fixes were announced later, fans may already see the complete list of planned changes. However, this does not mean that Olaf or Taliyah will have to wait longer. One of the designers shared a list of fixes that can already be tested on PBE servers.
What are Olaf’s changes like?
Olaf is not doing very well at the moment. He is chosen relatively rarely and wins less than 49% of the games played. The skillset has long stood out from the standards that the creators follow when designing the latest heroes, which certainly reflected his popularity. This is one of the reasons why the designers decided to take a closer look at Olaf’s skillset and refresh it a bit.
Riot Axes in his post told the community about the biggest problems of the changed champion.
The Olaf mid scope update is coming to PBE today with an intended ship date of patch 12.9 (not 12.8). Putting him up early for feedback, so he should be on PBE for about a week, and then he’ll disappear as we prep patch 12.8. He’ll return to PBE when we kick off the 12.9 cycle.
Before getting into the actual changes, let’s talk goals. One common response to the initial announcement was confusion as to why he’d be next up on the list for an update.
Olaf has a number of urgent issues we’re looking to address. First, he is (and has consistently been) the least deeply played champion in League—on average, that is. If Olaf is a champion you play, he probably makes up the lowest percent of your games played, and has consistently been among the lowest for many years now. Second, he’s a deeply pro-bound champion: his win rate is kept lower than would otherwise be ideal because he tends to take over pro play when his kit is tuned to win games in Solo Queue. And third, he’s been deeply impacted by systems changes this season, even more so than other fighters, putting him in particularly bad shape with the current item system.
With these problems in mind, the goals for this update are to add significant excitement to his kit, remove a bit of pro-oriented power (reduce how easily he escapes dangerous situations with his R as well as curb how fast his jungle clear can get when perfectly optimized.) Lastly, this update should help him use Juggernaut items effectively to scale better than before, which should also make him more resilient to future systems changes. For lanes, we’re aiming to preserve his ability to Jungle (while making it more accessible) while significantly increasing his viability in Top Lane.
Below you can see the full list of changes that have already appeared on the test servers.
- Base Stats
- Attack Damage :: 68 (+3.5/level), 127.5 at level 18 >>> 68 (+4.7/level), 148 at level 18
- Health :: 575 (+100/level), 2275 at level 18 >>> 575 (+105/level), 2360 at level 18
- Mana :: 316 (+42/level), 1030 at level 18 >>> 316 (+60/level), 1336 at level 18
- Passive – Berserker Rage
- Calculation reworked to grant max effectiveness at or below 30% health
- Maximum Attack Speed granted :: 99% >>> 40-100% (levels 1-18)
- [NEW] Now gives up to 12-35% life steal (levels 1-18), based on Olaf’s missing health
- Undertow (Q)
- [NEW] – Shreds 25/27.5/30/32.5/35% armor for 4 seconds on champion hit
- Damage :: 80/125/170/215/260 >>> 60/110/160/210/260
- Minimum Range :: Approximately 300 >>> 425
- Mana Cost :: 60 at all ranks >>> 40/45/50/55/60
- Cooldown :: 7 seconds >>> 8 seconds
- Cooldown refund on axe pickup :: 4.5 seconds >>> 5 seconds
- Vicious Strikes (W) – (the ability is reworked and may be named differently)
- [NEW] Resets Olaf’s basic attack
- [NEW] Olaf gains 70/115/160/205/250 (+25% of Olaf’s missing health) as a shield for 2.5 seconds
- [REMOVED] No longer grants Life Steal
- [REMOVED] No longer amplifies Olaf’s healing based on missing health
- Attack Speed :: 50/60/70/80/90% for 6 seconds >>> 40/50/60/70/80% for 4 seconds
- Cooldown :: 16 seconds at all ranks>>> 16/14.5/13/11.5/10 seconds
- Ragnarok (R)
- [NEW] Hitting a champion with a basic attack or E – Reckless Swing extends the duration of Ragnarok to 2.5 seconds. Olaf can refresh Ragnarok indefinitely.
- Duration :: 6 seconds >>> 3 seconds
- [REMOVED] R – Ragnarok’s passive’s bonus resistances are no longer lost for the duration of the cast
The changes described above are to be delivered to the servers in Update 12.9, which is scheduled for May 11, 2022. Olaf fans will have to wait a moment longer to play with a refreshed character.