Maokai will get some Buffs in Upcoming Patch in League of Legends

Tanks have been hit with quite a few buffs throughout the last few patches—and it looks like Patch 7.13 will be no exception. Buffs to Maokai are on the way, according to the latest PBE update.

Maokai’s had a rough couple of months. Before the big Midseason Update in Patch 7.9, he was king of the top lane. Following his rework in that patch, he fell all the way down to the very bottom of both the top and jungle meta. Ironically, though, he underwent the least changes of the three vanguard tanks affected by the update. His saplings and Q received minor system tweaks. But the only skill entirely replaced was his ultimate, and it turns out, he was very reliant on his old ultimate to be powerful.

His new ultimate, Nature’s Grasp, is a slow moving but very large onslaught of roots that come up out of the ground to snare enemies. It looks really, really cool, but that’s about it. The roots move so slowly that the entirety of the enemy team can essentially just walk away from it. And it’s not like it’s a multi-team stun—it’s just a snare, so they can still attack while immobilized. For such a small benefit, the ability’s cooldown is just massively unnecessary, so the cooldown is being reduced significantly in the next patch.  Another buff was also added to the ability on the PBE that will also increase the range of it as well. Will this be enough to help Maokai regain his footing? Probably not, but at least it’s a start.

These changes were added to the PBE this week, which means they’ll probably go live with Patch 7.13 in a couple of weeks.