Alistar has been one of the strongest support tanks for a while, whether you’re measuring pros or not. In order to create a more equitable support ecosystem, we’re delivering a nerf. While 7 armor may seem like a drastic change, recent armor nerfs to Braum and Leona both showed that these champions are very resilient to this type of change. We’ll of course be monitoring this change to ensure it hits our desired mark here.

Alistar is a big, beefy support that likes to charge his enemies and toss them up into the sky. As other squishier champions have come to fill similar roles, we want to make Alistar a bit better at doing what he loves: milking his enemies for gold. These base health and armor changes should give him even more beefiness and the ability to brawl harder in the early game.

Despite our best intentions, Alistar lost out last patch. Turns out his teamfight healing is pretty important. For those of you who are fans of Wizard Cow, he doesn't appear to be very good as a mage and we're not intending for that to be the case any time soon. These AP ratio buffs are simply to make stat shards and other sources of Ability Power feel good.

Compared to other melee supports, Alistar has been falling behind the herd. We're looking to increase the uptime of his Q - Pulverize so he can more often use a second Pulverize in fights—especially when he has his ultimate going.

Alistar has been thwacking his enemies (and his bell) in Pro and other levels of play. As one of the top three tank supports at the moment alongside Rell and Thresh, he's able to bring too much beef for his damage and threat potential. We're giving his damage a ding down to make his output more reasonable.