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Pyke has always been a champion with the potential to steamroll a game of League of Legends. Ever since his release, players have often taken him for a ride in the mid-lane, making him a perfect mid-laner to roam, secure objectives, and assassinate enemies on the way. Thanks to his R - Death From Below, he can even share kill gold with allies from his executes on enemies. Notably, according to U.GG, Pyke had a win rate of 53.44% in the mid-lane in LoL Patch 12.7, making him the second-highest win rate champion in the game, only after Seraphine.
Pyke was initially listed in the long list of LoL Patch 12.8, however, Riot Games pulled him off of the list: “We've pulled a few things from this patch either for more time or after reconsiderations.”
Now, it looks like the Pyke changes are imminent after all as the changes for Pyke on the Public Beta Environment (PBE) are the hot topic of discussion amongst the player base.
What are the Pyke changes on the PBE?
According to Twitter user Spideraxe, Riot has reportedly made changes to his Q - Bone Skewer and R - Death From Below. There are a couple of corrections from the original tweet. Tapping Bone Skewer always slowed the enemies from the start and Riot is just adding it to the tooltip now. Spideraxe later clarified, “Quick test shows that tap Q slow is mostly just a tooltip bug fix (doesn't mention it on live)” Additionally, mana cast on Q has been increased to 74 to 90 and not 78 to 90.
The changes to Q - Bone Skewer are:
Q mana cost increased from 55 - 70 to 74 - 90
Q mana refund increased from 50% to 75% if Q hits a champion or if the channel does not go through completely.
In the case of his R - Death From Below, Pyke will no longer cash in extra 300 gold if he executes an enemy all by himself. In essence, should Pyke ever get a solo kill, his R will not consider him as assisting himself, and only give him the gold from the kill.
Since these are the changes on the PBE, the numbers and the nerfs are still subject to change over the course of time. Riot Games has also not officially discussed the Pyke nerfs, so players will have to sit tight to see what the company is actually going to do. But, the change to his ultimate is significantly huge since Pyke’s team fighting falls off in the late game and he can only be useful to his team by picking off enemies caught in the wrong place, all by himself.
However, Game Designer Kevin “Captain Gameplay” Huang made an interesting tweet on 27th April. He wrote, “Very VERY experimental, but tomorrow on PBE pykers is getting infinite execute threshold scaling on his R everytime he executes anything from any source🤽”
What this basically means is that the more executes that Pyke gets with any source from his kit, his R - Death From Below is going to scale infinitely. This could possibly be to offset the nerfs that he shall be getting in the coming patches and the community should be getting an update on the Pyke situation very soon.
