Since our recent adjustments to Mel, she’s been hitting too hard with her initial Q missile whether ahead or behind, even as opponents dodge the rest of the spell, so we’re looking to take her damage down a notch. We’re also aiming to reduce how frustrating her W can be by lowering the bonus mobility she gets and the spell’s uptime, with the movespeed now matching her shield and reflect duration.

Mel’s recent update and follow-up balance work has succeeded in creating more counterplay and thus reducing her frustration and ban rate with a similar win rate to the preceding patches. With the initial dust now settled, it’s time to bring her up to a more reasonable power level. We’re looking toward her proactive damage, especially with champion level, to skew these buffs strongly toward the mid lane. We’re also sliding in a small compensation to her passive’s minion mod in order to not push her Q-driven wave clear any higher than it already is.

This changelist is intended to help lower player frustration while playing against Mel through opening up additional counterplay opportunities for opponents beyond the ban button. One big change we have is changing her reflect damage immunity to a shield which will ensure when Fizz successfully lands his ultimate she no longer completely negates the damage with a late W. We also want to make sure when you're laning against her that you can see her Q coming and dodge out of the way at long ranges like many spammable projectile spells. Both her Q and E should now be more visually clear (thus easier to dodge) and we've reduced some of the power from her reflect in some situations where her reflections resulted in unexpectedly high damage. While we believe that champion agency can yield frustrating interactions, we also believe there should be avenues for counterplay to balance that out. Frankly, we underestimated how frustrating the play-against experience for Mel would be and are aiming to improve that with this change list. And for players looking to play Mel we want her to be playable more consistently after the ban phase while making sure her core gameplay that her players have come to love isn't lost. Our goals with these changes are that more players feel they can outplay Mel in ways that match their expectations, and that Mel players can feel more skillful and that their success is a result of that skill. We expect that there will continue to be players whose main champions are highly impacted by Mel's reflection that may continue to prioritize her as a ban, but we're targeting to get her out of must-ban territory for many players.

While not mathematically overpowered, Mel has solidified herself as the most frustrating champion to face in League, which is a deeper problem than just numbers. In the short term we're delivering a direct nerf that will still allow dedicated mains to win an appropriate number of games, but will make her suboptimal for inexperienced players. As for our changes themselves, we're going after how inescapable her E can feel to play against. In the longer term, we have some larger work planned for early next year with more significant changes aimed at returning her to a more appropriate power level while also making her feel more fair to play against for her opponents.

We're glad that Mel is a viable mid laner (shoutout League's GOAT for raising awareness!). However, she's also proven to be one of League's most frustrating champions, which we're looking to alleviate. Her passive buffs that required her to take on more risk were successful in our eyes, so we're headed back to that. To continue to expose her to more risk, we're weakening Solar Snare's lockdown and self-peel potential. We know she's still got such sharp interactions that she'll still sport one of League's highest ban rates, but we hope this adjustment will be roughly power-neutral and frustration-reducing.

Mel is statistically very weak and even though she sports a rather high ban rate, that doesn’t mean she has to be quite so underpowered for her player base. We’re playing up high-skill applications of her offensive output in order to bring her up in higher MMRs, where she performs much worse.

Mel was previously nerfed due to the banrate she was seeing, but she's weak and we are looking to cautiously bring some power back in areas that players hopefully don't find frustrating.

Mel has been very popular both to pick and to ban. We believe Mel experiences just a little too much safety for opponents to effectively punish her due to her range and ability durations. So to correct that we're lowering her Q range and speed, W duration, and early E root duration to make her a more assailable target. At the same time, we're returning some of her ability to scale into the mid and late game with some added damage to both E and R while lowering the damage value of W from rank up which results in some painful end game experiences.