Hwei has remained on the weaker side since the nerfs to his waveclear last year, and we are fixing a bug that we expect to be a further minor nerf. We still believe those waveclear nerfs to be correct as we want Hwei League's coolest combo mage, not just a walking waveclear machine. Therefore, we’re buffing his combo casting output up through his passive.

After Hwei's adjustments late last year, he's a little weaker than he ought to be. We don't want to buff his wave clear back up as that was the original problem he had, so instead we want to reward him for using his whole toolkit and coordinating with his team.

Hwei's a well-performing mid laner who has low-quality gameplay when he can simply throw out Q-E and clear waves with little effort. We'd like to weaken his access to non-committal wave clear by nerfing that output. As the intended rank 5 magnitude would mark an over-nerf, we're partially compensating him with an AP ratio buff. These changes will still result in a net reduction in power and should open up more room for laning phase interactivity.

Hwei has been producing fine art, but we've seen some player feedback saying that he struggles to find footing, partially due to his strength waning over gametime, which we agree with. To fix this we're buffing his AP ratios to give his art more impact as he gets gold, and giving him some higher-mastery skewed buffs that will help his WQ feel smoother to use.

Hwei could use a bit of a touch up relative to the rest of the mage roster. His early game is strong and in a good spot, but his late game power leaves a bit to be desired to be a true carry threat. Giving him a bit more of a punch to push more of those games over the line.

Hwei's currently painting L's for his opponents, especially when it's a higher skilled player holding the brush. As a champion that benefits from his flexibility to adapt to all situations we're looking to reduce how well he can optimize his laning phase and other tools that better players typically use.

Players have gotten much better at Hwei over the last year, so it’s finally time to nudge him down. We’d like to bring down his early lane poke with QQ flat damage, its scaling into mid and late game, and lastly want to increase the cooldown on his CC, making the decision making on which one you use more important.

There’s a decent appetite for Hwei support from players, but it’s currently a bit weak, so to help those players out we’re buffing his WW shield to allies to push his support up a decent amount, and hopefully not mid by much.

Hwei was one of the biggest Blackfire Torch winners from 14.10, which means he's now overpowered by our estimation and he'll continue to gain win rate as more players shift over to his new builds. As he gained substantial wave clear and overall team fight damage, we're specifically bringing those areas back down.

We expected we’d have to balance Hwei around Pro play with pretty low win rates for regular players. However, as the Pro season has developed, it looks like we have more room than we initially thought, so we’re giving him a small buff to his passive, which brings him up a touch in lower-skilled brackets where players don’t dodge away from the damage as well. Our goal is that he’ll be a moderate-presence champion in Pro play while also being as successful as most other mages in solo queue.

As players are still learning Hwei, we’re giving him a small bump up in power, primarily for the sake of Hwei’s teammates, who are on the receiving end of a fairly low win rate. Long term, we think Hwei is probably in a very good spot or maybe a little too powerful but we’re tuning him for January, not June. We’ll continue to monitor his performance and make adjustments as needed.

Every mark should have meaning. Make your mark with Hwei on December 6, 2023 at 21:00 UTC.