Riot to nerf support roaming and buff marksmen in Patch 26.16 as mages bot takes over

Riot Games is stepping in on the mages bot meta. In Patch 26.16, it will nerf support roaming and hand a series of buffs to marksmen, Lead Gameplay Designer Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison announced on July 29.

The headline change targets the roaming support directly. The out of lane gold and experience penalty goes from 25% until level three to 33% until level five. Alongside it come buffs to Berserker's Greaves and Fleet Footwork, a buff to Heal, and a rebalancing of AD carry magic resistance, with a higher base value and reduced growth. Riot is also testing more speculative changes it plans to detail later in the week.

Phroxzon framed the patch as a correction rather than a purge. Mage presence in the bot lane sat at roughly 20% of picks at MSI, but it climbed at both EWC and the KeSPA Cup and has since spread into ranked. Riot likes mages being viable there, he said, but views the current state as too far a swing away from marksmen.

He also traced how the game arrived here. Patch 26.11 buffed melee supports and nerfed ranged ones, especially enchanters, to break up a lane dominant support meta. At the same time, players found ways around the anti-roaming and anti-lane swap controls built into the season start support quests. The two moves pushed in the same direction at once.

Gumayusi: "They don't let me do anything"

The developer post lands two days after Lee "Gumayusi" Min-hyeong voiced his frustration on stream. The three-time world champion said he became an AD carry player to play auto-attack based champions, and that mages now beat him up in his own lane. Cassiopeia outfights Draven, he noted, while Ziggs and Xerath outrange Caitlyn with better wave clear and crowd control on top.

The MSI winner did not call for mages to be removed from the lane. Picks like Ziggs can exist as niche counterpicks, he argued, but they should not become the meta — much as nobody would want a top lane made up of Vayne, Twitch and Tristana.

Riot has heard that argument before. During MSI, Phroxzon defended mages bot as healthy diversity, pointing to a roughly four to one ratio of traditional marksmen to mages and arguing their inflated winrates reflected shallow mastery curves rather than raw power. He repeated the mastery curve point this week, comparing it to a novice friendly Malphite. What changed is the presence, not the diagnosis.