Patch 26.16: three ninjas, and a Rift that pays differently

Three champions join at once, and all three run on energy. Until yesterday this Rift had exactly zero of them.

That matters beyond the champion select screen. Energy does not scale, does not benefit from the mana items half your build path is made of, and does not care about mana regeneration runes. A champion on energy is playing a different resource game from everyone around them: they are never out of gas in a long fight, and never able to spend their way through a short one.

The rune shop follows, with energy runes arriving alongside them. If you intend to touch Akali, Kennen or Shen, that is the first thing to sort out, because the pages you already own do nothing for them.

Akali brings invisibility and repeated dashes onto a Rift where most escapes are a flash and a prayer. Anyone whose safety depended on standing slightly further back needs to rethink that.

Kennen can be built two ways, as a diving mage or as an attack damage carry hitting from range, which is a genuinely awkward thing to draft against because the counter to one is not the counter to the other.

Shen taunts, dashes, and heals an ally. He is the one that changes teamfights rather than duels, and the one most likely to reshape which top laners are worth picking.

Passive income goes up, minion gold goes down. On a spreadsheet those cancel out. In a game they absolutely do not.

The player who was farming perfectly loses part of what that discipline earned them. The player who spent the laning phase getting zoned off the wave now gets more anyway. The gap between a good and a bad laning phase narrows, without either player changing anything.

The practical consequence is that snowballing a lane buys you less than it did, and falling behind costs you less than it did. If your whole plan was to win a matchup and turn that into a two-item lead, that plan is now worth measurably less.

Monster health scales harder over the course of a game. Clearing a camp late is slower relative to what it used to be, which pushes junglers toward the same items everyone already builds and away from the greedy paths.

Homeguards also stop existing in the early game and only turn on later. Walking back to lane costs a full walk again, so a bad recall timing is punished properly rather than papered over.

Turrets are tougher across the board, and the part of their damage that scaled with ability power is reduced.

Read those two together and it means one thing: taking a turret with two people and no minion wave is worse than it was. Sieging is back to being a team activity that needs a wave, which slows the pace of the whole midgame.

Amumu, Dr. Mundo, Garen, Lux, Skarner, Soraka and Veigar come out ahead. Blitzcrank, Heimerdinger, Jarvan IV, Katarina, Nasus, Tryndamere, Twitch and Warwick come out behind.

The change worth pointing at is not on that list, though: ten of those champions lost their magic resistance growth entirely. Not reduced, removed. They now gain nothing against magic damage as they level, which is a slow, invisible nerf that will only show up when you notice a mage killing something that used to survive.

If you play one of those ten, your late game against an ability power threat is genuinely worse, and nothing on your screen will tell you why.

Every stat on this site is versioned by patch. Champion and item pages now serve 26.16 values, and the seal at the top of each page tells you which patch you are reading.

What has not moved: no item changed in this patch, so your build paths are intact. Whether the tier list moves is a separate question, and one we would rather answer after the games have been played than the day the notes drop.