Doran Shield Nerfs on PBE Soon

With the insane power behind Doran's Shield at the moment, (see this article about supports specifically) Riot's released some notes earlier this morning regarding upcoming nerfs on the shield in developmental stages.



Doran's Shield
100 Health --> 80 Health
10 HP/5 --> 5 HP/5
8 Block --> Unchanged

SSJSuntastic's thoughts on effects:

It seems like these changes still leave it better than starting with relic shield, but may open up the Ruby Crystal start for supports. In regards to top and mid laners, we might see a trend back towards Doran Blades/Rings.

For champions, these changes may make Riven and other top lane glass cannons strong again, and is an indirect nerf to melee mid assassins like Akali and Katarina since they'll be more easily poked down by "conventional" mages.

 Official Riot Post by RiotXypherous:

Just a quick note because this will hit PBE soon (Monday) and will probably require some decent scrutiny / input. I also wanted to provide a quick heads up to head off the storm of conjecture these kinds of things usually do.

Testing some fairly severe Doran's Shield nerfs - going kind of ham on the initial testing numbers to try to quickly find the point where it makes or breaks things.

Doran's Shield is warping the bottom lane matchups and pick structure right now fairly significantly. The relative power of the item has also dramatically increased due to the mastery / vision / support changes and so the item is just better in every respect this season compared to last.
What this means is that certain harass based characters are basically in a weird twilight state where they get stomped heavily and also have to pick up shield in order not to get counter bursted by the same ones using Doran's Shield.

Doran's Shield
100 Health --> 80 Health
10 HP/5 --> 5 HP/5
8 Block --> Unchanged

The idea behind hitting just the Health / HP/5 is to enable magic-based harassment still effective while also keeping Doran's Shield strong against ranged attacks (I.E. I am fighting Caitlyn and Lulu and I hate my life.)

We like the item's niche - but at the moment it's just too generically good against a wide array of matchups at the moment and shuts down both counterburst and harassment strategies a little too hard.

I suspect that the HP/5 nerf is a bit much and we'll have to reassess the strength of some mid-laners who rely on the item. As for 'Why do this now?' kind of issues - We're in the middle of some tier 0.5 item cleanup and Doran's Shield also kind of warps all of those issues, making tier 0.5 items kind of dance around the fact that they'll never compete.

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