As we know, a few days ago, Riot Games announced a very noteworthy experiment regarding the champion Pyke on the PBE server. Specifically, Pyke was set to receive 2 new features, the first being the ability to instantly kill wards when nearby an ally. The second feature was that the execution threshold of the ultimate ability, Death from Below, would increase when Pyke uses this skill to take down champions, minions, or monsters….
Immediately after this feature was tested on the PBE server, a wave of intense criticism emerged. The reason was that players believed these features only made Pyke a more toxic champion without helping to eliminate his Mid Lane capabilities. In fact, the ability to execute wards even made Pyke in the Mid Lane stronger when paired with a powerful Jungler like Lee Sin or Xin Zhao.
Furthermore, the increase in execution thresholds for the ultimate made Pyke’s gameplay unreasonably strong. Normally, Assassins need to use their skills wisely to quickly eliminate opponents. However, the new feature allowed Pyke to execute opponents solely with his ultimate, while other skills could miss. Clearly, this was unreasonable and something Riot should not have given to this champion.
As a result, Riot’s new features faced an avalanche of criticism and extremely negative feedback. This forced Riot Games to remove all the new features they had tested for Pyke just about 2 days after implementation. As of now, Pyke on the PBE server has returned to being similar to the official version.
Perhaps this is another lesson for Riot in adding new features or attempting to adjust a champion. It would be unfortunate if they made a skill that was already overpowered and unbalanced even stronger, which is extremely unreasonable.