K'Sante has been quite sad in Solo Queue recently, and had very little presence in Pro due to a particular ap tank busting top laner. In this patch we’ll be buffing his W rank-up incentive slightly to better even out the discrepancy between maxing W and E second. In addition, we’re updating his default item shop page to show more tank items which should help avoid non-optimal itemization choices.

K'Sante's early laning phase is just too strong, and some of his outputs later in the game are a bit shocking and overly powerful, especially around highly charged Path Maker casts. We're nerfing both of these aspects with a couple of targeted adjustments.

K'Sante's early-game is too strong, so we're nerfing it. Separately, he's too easy to kite in All Out. We're cautious of erasing the counterplay gains from the recent rework, so we're making a smaller improvement to his dash speed for now.

While K'Sante is intended to be a difficult champion, in the hands of skilled players he offers high levels of safety, reliability, and general power regardless of his circumstances or the relative skill of his enemies. This has made him a Pro staple since release at the cost of his playability for most players (a tale as old as time). Our aim, however, is not to make K'Sante an easy champion, or one that anybody can pick up and play. He should absolutely be a more difficult champion who rewards deep mastery and experience. He should not be a champion who top-tier players can reliably pick into any situation, even if they aren't great at K'Sante specifically. When a K'Sante player pops off, it should be clear to all that this success was earned through superior play. With these changes, we're asking K'Sante to commit to fights and actively outplay his opponents, taking risks and testing his skill against theirs. His Q and W are less reliable, but players who can consistently land their spells regardless should find even more success. His lane safety has been reduced and compensated with more power to actively win, rather than passively scale. We're also solidifying the roles of his two forms as Warden and Skirmisher—he should be excellent at protecting his allies as a defensive tank, and thrive as a fighter in the smaller-scale encounters he can set up with his R. His All Out E has been reshaped to fit the frequent repositioning needed in tense 1v1s with decreased cooldown and increased speed, rather than increased range that's best used for diving squishy backline champions in teamfights. The damage profile of his ultimate form has also been updated to focus on target-agnostic damage—as a monster hunter, he should be better equipped to cut down enemies of all sizes. Overall, we expect changes of this magnitude to require some relearning. We appreciate your patience and dedication, and hope you enjoy the update. Get out there and make Nazumah proud, hunters.

We're making some adjustments to K'Sante to tune him into being a more aggressive champion and less about soaking up damage on the front line. We're giving him some lane agency and power in the 1v1 through All Out's life steal but making him worse at absorbing the most damage of any tank. Our hope is to maintain him as a viable top laner for those who have mastered him without being the most durable tank, since he's already the most threatening one. We're also doing a pass on his recommended runes as there are several unpopular options that appear to be much stronger than what players traditionally run.

Oh K'Sante. As a fairly new (...right?) and difficult-to-play champion, we don't expect him to have exceptionally strong performances on all but the most practiced players (read: Pros). That said, he took a hit last patch when we updated his hitbox and selection radius. As a result, he's performing worse in solo queue than we'd like, so we're shipping him some buffs. We're buffing E's rank-up since a decent portion of K'Sante players choose to max it second and we're comfortable with it being competitive with W. Otherwise we're just upping his baseline durability since he became easier to hit.

K'Sante doesn't leave a lot of room for counterplay during All Out (you might even say his opponents are all out of counter play options), so we're aiming to address his opponents' ability to outplay him, or at least give them the time to process what he's doing. We think that these changes will result in some degree of lost power, but we believe that these adjustments should help get K'Sante in an overall better state long term.

We overshot our nerf on K'Sante last patch but we're happy with the parts of his kit that we addressed. Now that we've nerfed the lane safety provided by his Q, we're aiming to buff him by making Path Maker a more active part of his laning phase through softening its mana cost and then increasing his reliance on gold income via these ratio buffs.

K'Sante's kit update back in 13.20 has moved him in the direction that we want with more room for opponents to counterplay. However, we've still been trying to land his tuning to ensure he has a proper spread of strong and weak matchups. The goals with this patch are to ensure that K'Sante has real difficulty in bad matchups. A weaker shield, costlier Q, and especially reduced damage at his level 6 power spike should ensure strong 1v1 laners can excel against him. He's still meant to be a strongly-scaling, sometimes-warden, sometimes-skirmisher and we'll continue to re-tune him as necessary to ensure he's a high-skill champion worth mastering, without easily dominating his opposition.

We micropatched K'Sante early on in 13.21 and this note is here to make sure you all see that this change went live last week. His changes over the past few weeks have closed the gap between elite and average skilled play. He's still much better in the hands of well-practiced players, which is very much intended. Now that he's accessible and strong in the hands of many more players, we're going to wait and see how his new strengths and weaknesses manifest in Pro play but will continue monitoring his performance in other tiers.

We’re following up on 13.20’s K’Sante changes, which achieved many of the goals we wanted but not the one to make him more powerful, so we’re back to fix that! Not only are we fixing his power level, we’re also fixing a slew of bugs. The primary goal with this patch’s buffs is to significantly amp his power level in All Out to make sure shedding his resists is worth it. Additionally, we’re trying to increase his skill expression by allowing him to hold Path Maker for damage reduction for longer. This will allow him to embrace his most common builds and cap out his Ntofo Strikes cast speed more quickly with less bonus health.

K'Sante has been suffering in average play due to needing to balance him around Pro since his launch. Once mastered, he leaves little room for reaction and his opponents will often find themselves dead while being stunned the whole time. After all, it doesn't matter how good Showmaker is if K'Sante can hit-confirm his whole combo via an instant cast spell. Meanwhile, most players won't even know what that means. The changes here broadly serve two goals: the first is to slow down the beginning of K'Sante's combos: Path Maker now has a minimum channel time and he cannot Flash during Q3. Both of these changes will allow skilled players to outplay his incoming combos which was difficult to do before. However, if these more difficult skill shots land, K'Sante can combo his abilities together just as before. The second set of goals aims to give K'Sante stronger overall abilities now that his counterplay has been improved. This means much stronger stuns and damage from W plus more reliable upsides from All Out.

Despite being relatively weak in the hands of the average player, K'Sante is quite popular and powerful in skilled play. Due to this we'll be giving him a Pro-skewed nerf that will bring him to a more balanced state in higher levels of play while having a minimal impact on his average play win rates.

K’Sante has too much CC right now, which allows him to lock down opponents too effectively, so we’re tapping down his numbers to make him a little less oppressive (these changes should also help make Tenacity more effective against the Pride of Nazumah). Lastly, we’re also dropping his durability when he goes All Out in fights to emphasize the need for him to isolate his enemies.

As players have become more comfortable and skilled on K’Sante he’s started becoming strong, which is par for the course. However, combined with his last buffs this pushed him a little too far in high skill brackets of play. We’re bringing his power down a notch before he starts to become particularly problematic.

K’Sante has been a tad weak in average skill brackets, so we’re giving him a few quality of life upgrades that should help him perform better in the hands of average players without pushing him over the line in elite play.

Hear his name and know his strength on November 3.