As expected Smolder has become much more powerful with the new Essence Reaver and increased minion counts. Since we’ve tuned our systems to our liking for now, it’s time to take stock of individual champions, Smolder being one. We want to make sure Smolder’s strong late-game damage has durability tradeoffs, even when buying the occasional HP item.

Smolder, like Gangplank, stands to gain a lot of power from Essence Reaver's changes in this patch so we're taking a swing at how strongly his Q scales with critical strike purchases.

Despite being a thematically scale-ing dragon, Smolder's early game is actually quite potent. Peeling back some of his comfort early game by allowing enemy poke to hurt more and stick better.

We'd like to give Smolder a shot in the arm (wing) this patch. Since his last update managed to largely remove his stalling aspect from pro play, we think there's room to re-add some of his stack scaling that he lost.

Smolder's been the opposite of on fire recently which is ironic given his name, so we're looking to buff up the areas that aren't hitting the bar we'd like. His W is below the bar for last hitting early game, his E bolts aren't worth using offensively, and now that his R doesn't cook waves, it doesn't need to have a long cooldown throughout the game. Altogether, these should light a fire within our favorite little dragon and get him back on track to receive some head pats from Mommy Smolder.

We're delivering a very small Smolder buff, opening up Infinity Edge as a capstone option by letting its crit damage scale Q, since crit chance already scales the ability.

In his current state Smolder's a bit too good at stalling out games which gives him plenty of time to accrue stacks and get to his powerful, late game, executing all who stand in his way. We're not looking to make his stacking mechanic pointless, but we do want to shift how much of his power comes stacks into both stacks and gold. He'll still be the premiere scaling ADC, but in a way that isn't solely dependent on stacking which also helps remove his pro-skill skew.

Smolder risks becoming a dominant top/mid pick at Worlds this year, but is otherwise a pretty balanced bot laner. These nerfs are meant to be solo lane skewed so that he doesn’t lose too much power in bot, but without a riskier set of changes, some pain for bot laners is unavoidable. This patch we’re nerfing his early laning power and self-sufficiency which helps him succeed in solo lanes.

We're looking to flatten Smolder's power over game time a bit, and his early game is not quite as fiery as we intended for it to be. This patch we're giving Smolder some additional laning firepower so he can be a bit scrappier of dragon.

Smolder got hit a bit harder than we wanted to last patch, so we’re returning some power in ways we think won’t be terribly frustrating. Now that he’s less evasive through E, he can stand to be more baseline durable. And now that his late-game power isn’t nearly as guaranteed, we’re going to return some damage in a way that asks him to build squishier items and be closer to his target.

Smolder is just a lil guy, but this lil guy’s dream of scaling with his stacks can feel like an inevitable nightmare for his opponents. While we don’t believe he’ll be problematic in the long term, there are quite a few frustrating or overpowered parts of his kit right now that we’re looking to address this patch. First, his execute scaling based on stacks has been too powerful, so we’re capping it at 6.5%. Second, the safety from his E and mismatched hitbox with his W visuals can be quite frustrating to go up against and help him scale more easily, so we’re nerfing them both with the goal of making Smolder’s early game weaknesses more noticeable for players that find themselves matched up against him.

Smolder is currently in a healthy spot and we’re generally happy with how he’s landed on the Rift. In this patch we’re making some adjustments to how he scales and interacts with the item system to disincentivize tankier builds and to put even more emphasis on his stacking and late game dragon fantasy. We also want proactive E casts to matter more for all builds, not just crit ones. Finally, R’s sweet spot mechanic is a little underemphasized so we’re aiming to make it matter more!

Smolder's W has proven to be a very powerful poking tool during the laning phase. While we're happy that players want to max and poke with it, we want to slightly reduce its power at lower ranks due to the PVP damage it can provide while also ensuring that it never one shots the wave, preventing Smolder from stacking with Q and scaling. We're also taking this opportunity to add in some QoL improvements and bug fixes that will help Smolder live his best dragon fantasy better.