Shen is one of the strongest top laners in the game, if not the strongest, and ultimately while we believe it’s good if he’s one of the better picks because he creates unique and interesting circumstances relative to other top laners, he doesn’t need to dominate matchups as hard as he currently does. We’d like to preserve his tankiness, teammate affinity, and overall dueling power, but he doesn’t need to be so bursty in later game fights, so we’re taking down some of his E scaling damage.

We're happy with recent Shen buffs directionally, but they haven't quite hit the magnitude we're looking for. We've given him more utility, but what he needs now is more damage to actually fight it out in lanes. It's time to bring it back.

Despite recent increases to his tower damage, Shen is still underperforming. We're giving him some more access to tools to let him scrap it out in toplane.

: Shen was always intended to be a functional splitpusher, but in the current state of the game he simply doesn't have enough damage against structures to threaten real damage. Letting his Q base damage work against turrets should give him a bit of extra sidelane pressure.

Shen has really enjoyed the recent itemization shifts and devaluation of gold and is now stronger than we're comfortable with. We'd like to preserve his crowd control, 1v1 dueling, and late-game tankiness, so we're lowering power in places we think Shen players are willing to lose.

We’d like if Shen also joined the list of strong-feeling top lane tanks at Worlds this year. While he’s already seeing some success as a support, we want to make sure he’s also doing well in his primary role. We’re buffing his level-scaling and gold-scaling tankiness to make sure that come late game, Shen feels like he can withstand incoming damage in both duels and team fights.

Shen is a unique tank with strong 1v1 dueling potential and we’d like to make sure he continues to live up to that standard. So this patch we’re amping up his mid-game selfish combat power by adjusting the scaling of his passive’s cooldown refund for better trading potential.

As a system, energy is intended to give champions spikes of power that fall off with extended combat times. Given the current state of the game and more extended fights, champions that use energy as a resource have found it more difficult to find success before their energy depletes (note: this section is repeated for energy users in this patch). Shen is doing relatively okay in terms of energy efficiency, so we’re just giving him a tiny buff to help him in the late game.

With the changes to Teleport in 12.1, Shen has once again become king when it comes to map influence from top lane. To bring things back to equilibrium, we're lowering his damage as a duelist instead of bringing down his cross-map power so that his unique, global presence remains his most powerful tool.

Shen's tipping the top lane tank meta out of equilibrium. We're reverting the 10.15 buff to his shield to restore some of the balance.

With only base values and a token AP ratio, Shen’s ult feels more like a bubble than a shield, making it too unreliable for protecting squishy allies when they get caught out late game. We’re adding another ratio to make his scaling considerably better and to help him feel more empowered to protect his friends late game.