Reign of Gaming

Trust me, our live design dudes are very much aware of Win Nao. There's a bunch of changes being tested on PBE, but overall what it boils down to is we're reducing base damages and increasing E and R cooldowns to reduce the amount of burst he gets even while building tanky. If that doesn't work we can adjust further.

I think our live design team has seriously stepped up its game. We tend to be a lot more reactive now. If we overnerf we reverse the changes, of course, but there's also that old psychological effect. One story Feralpony told me once was that we put out patch notes saying Vlad pool had lost its MS buff and received some other nerfs and Vlad was suddenly considered trash tier, with both his pick and his win rate plummeting. Problem was, the changes accidentally never went out. So after it seems like a champion was overnerfed and is trash now, we have to wait a little to make sure that's actually what happened. Remember also that Hecarim was considered weak for the longest time and has skyrocketed to the top of jungle picks now with no changes.

Yes, of course Season 3 itemization helps him out immensely. But there was something like a 2 month gap between Season 3 items and Hecarim becoming FOTM.