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Locke hasn’t even reached live servers yet, but Riot Games is already dialing back his power level on the League of Legends PBE. The yet-to-be-released champion has quickly become a focal point of testing due to his potent AP assassin kit and impressive sustain from his W ability, Soul Ignition. New numbers indicate that he may have been too forgiving in fights as far as taking downburst damage goes.
The majority of the changes hit Soul Ignition. His base ability gives him movement speed and healing based on damage dealt to enemies while active, essentially allowing him to dive into fights and rarely punished.
On the PBE, Riot has significantly lowered the minimum and bonus healing values, decreasing Locke’s sustain potential throughout almost all phases of the game. All out skirmishes should now also favor the enemy team more than they did before if Locke players trade aggressively.
That said, Riot wasn’t all bad when it came to balancing Locke. While they did reduce the effectiveness of his W, they increased the AP scaling on the ability’s minimum heal. This should still allow high AP builds to gain more value from damage based items than their AD counterparts.
The bonus heal’s AP scaling was reduced, however. This means that once Locke finishes building a few items he won’t sustain quite as much in prolonged fights.
Soul Ignition was probably always going to be a challenging ability to balance. League of Legends assassins are supposed to thrive on taking risks in fights. If they succeed they’re rewarded with kills, but if they fail they can often be punished.
Giving Locke strong healing and mobility through Soul Ignition creates a situation where he can often fail and not die as a result. Playing against him could become extremely aggravating if numbers are too strong.
Even with the nerfs, Locke still shows a lot of promise. His damage and mobility are still untouched, so he has the potential to become a powerful mid-laner if the numbers on his other abilities are left intact.
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