Our few Skarner top laners have gained tremendous empathy for their solitary Brackern, as their brethren scattered and left them to become the last of their kind. By letting him cast more freely in lane while also giving him some more trading power on his bread and butter ability, we hope some of our scorpion bros will come out of hiding in top lane (and jungle too!)

Last patch's Skarner changes unfortunately landed him weaker than we had hoped and anticipated. We're now here to deliver direct buffs in order to give him the power he deserves. We were overly cautious on how much attack damage to give him, so we're back for more, and his Q isn't doing quite enough now that he can't quickly get two cycles off, so we're buffing its uptime and throughput.

Skarner is one of a few champions who’s a little weak but has a deceptively low win rate due to being quite hard to play. Still, he’s a champion who has room for buffs, so we’d like to do just that. We’re aware of his recent history with pro play, so we’re pairing these buffs with some nerfs that we hope will disproportionately affect low-ping, pro players. Our overall goal is a stronger Skarner who can sustain this new level of power for months to come. We’re nerfing Impale’s cast time to increase his counter-play for skilled opponents. As Skarner is meant to occasionally be a juggernaut, we’re increasing the viability of AD juggernaut items, specifically Sterak’s Gage, by increasing his total base AD and his overall AD scaling. And finally, to make him more approachable, we’re removing an awkward optimization around Q’s uptime with compensation that should feel similar for most players.

The Skorpion is due for another hit, this time targeting high skilled players' ability to optimize his Q. We're also increasing the cooldown on his mobility to force him to commit to engagements for longer before escaping.

Skarner is more mobile than most tanks and has an extremely potent engage and disengage tool in his E. His E already has a built in 35% cooldown reduction if he stuns a target with it, so the base cooldown has room to go up to make it harder to both engage and escape with it within the same short engagement. Additionally, since Skarner is so mobile he has room to lose some innate durability to put him more in line with other tanks.

Skarner is still the strongest jungler in the game, dealing a boatload of damage for how tanky he is. We'd like to retain that he's a high gold-scaling tank but tying his damage scaling a bit more toward building AD so that he isn't as deadly when built for tanking.

Skarner has been quite strong in pro and for those that are spending the time to master him, so we want to bring his power for skilled players down a bit. Much of this mastery payoff is coming around how much value you can get out of your E, so we’re mainly targeting that with a small nerf to his passive for good measure.

Skarner still isn't doing too well, so we're continuing to bring up his ability to tank and scrap with either jungle camps or top laners in the early game. We also want to help out his old juggernaut players, so we're buffing his AD ratios to make that build more appealing.

After our last round of nerfs to Skarner, he’s landed in a spot where he’s moderately too weak. However, he’s also got a gameplay flaw where casting E backwards can instantly snatch up an enemy and teleport them into his claws... pincers? We’d like to buff Skarner and remove his E-sec interaction at the same time with the hope of ensuring he’s still a tanky tank and has the tools to play out early fights as well.

As Skarner has been out for a while and players have gotten better at him, we've seen a continued rise in his ban rate and an overwhelming presence in Pro play. As a fairly new, moderately difficult champion, he's simply winning way too many games, and signs indicate that top lane is his most egregious role. So we're nerfing Skarner this patch with a few goals in mind: First, we'd like to make sure that Skarner fulfills the role of a tank so we're taking away damage instead of durability. Second, we want to make the early game counter-play of Top Lane a bit more fair: Harsher mana costs before he buys Tear and overall worse trading from Q hopefully make for a better experience for his top lane opponents. These nerfs won't have as meaningful of an impact on jungle since he easily hits the damage cap on his first clear but still affect his damage while fighting champions.

Skarner is currently far too strong in higher-MMR brackets, both in Top and Jungle. We expected there to be some Elite skew to Skarner, but he's also quite early-game skewed as well, which further pushes him toward high-level play. We're making some adjustments to shift his power that should make him weaker in the early game and stronger much later.

We're making some small updates to Skarner now that he's been out in the wild for a bit. First, we're changing up part of his ultimate's cast paradigm. We're letting displacement effects affect Skarner while winding up Impale, which will do a couple of things. The most fun one is to let him cast it reactively to an incoming Blitzcrank hook, delivering even more suppressions per cast. This also leaves some room for opponent counter-play as astute players can preemptively throw out spells like Explosive Cask and push Skarner away before he can snag his prey. Because this change will make him less consistent, we're also hastening the cast time, giving him a better shot at landing it without setup CC. We're also adding a little bit of QoL, allowing him to properly queue his spells before R. He still can't cast Q or E while Impaling someone, but in case it misses, he'll go right into his next cast. He's also due for some meaningful nerfs as arguably the strongest high-MMR jungler in the game. We're happy with his level of crowd control and durability, so we're going after his ability to kill squishy champions quickly. We also know that there's a large community of Skarner top players who will be negatively affected by these nerfs, so we're delivering some small compensation buffs aimed at top lane. Between these compensation buffs and Fimbulwinter's buffs, we hope players will still enjoy him in both roles.

Skarner is currently very overpowered, especially in elite play, where he’s making the Rift AND enemy’s boots quake. His potent early game often ends games before other champions can reach their power spikes which is why we’re going after his early game. We’ll be doing this by taking down a mix of his early damage and his sticking power with his Q and W. The mana regen line is here to give him a bit of compensation in top lane, as he’s currently a much stronger jungler than top laner and players are clearly happy to play him in both roles.

Skarner's rework launched last patch with low jungle power and very strong performances in top lane. We expect he'll perform better as players continue to learn his nuances but there's a lot of room to make the experience of playing Skarner much nicer. First, we're updating his recommended jungle runes and items. Every recommended page now suggests Resolve runes in the primary or secondary tree and includes an Aftershock page, as it's been a great rune for him. To our surprise, Heartsteel appears very good as well, so it's replacing Iceborn Gauntlet in his item recommendations. Second, we're doing a sweep of feels improvements to his Q, which should make him feel much more mobile and usable in fights at large. Third, we're shifting around power from his W into his Q. As it turns out, W-max top lane Skarner is significantly stronger than regular jungle Skarner with low counter-play, so we're trying to put these builds into similar power and fairness levels. We're also buffing the Q AD ratio to make juggernaut alt-builds more functional.

The last of his kind is the top of the jungle. Pulling back a bit of defensive power so Skarner can rest his weary claws.