League of Legends Announces Long Awaited Stealth Rework For Eve and Twitch

By Darren Henderson (DizzyPW), OnRPG Editor-in-Chief

 

 

It’s hard to say you are a part of Riot Games’ League of Legends community if you aren’t familiar with the infamous “Stealth Rework.” In one of the early steps to promoting less passive gameplay, League of Legends nerfed Evelynn and Twitch into the point of being nearly unusable (more so Eve than Twitch, but both have been untouched and in a bad way for over a year now). But after more than a year of failed attempts by Riot to rework these champions into a viable state that didn’t punish aggressive gameplay, the community was beginning to think that these champions had been abandoned and overlooked by the company.

 

 

Or so we thought.

 

 

Today Morello, Lead Champion Designer for Riot Games, along with Associate Game Designers Classick and Statikk, announced that the stealth rework will be going onto the public test servers before the next content update! Both champions will be undergoing some heavy reworks which I will now summarize for you.

 

 

Eve

The core design change for Eve from before is that she will now be about permanent stealth and rapid chasing and harassing of foes, rather than instagib stun and gank from stealth like she originally played. The primary reason for this is abandoning her previous useless passive that merely reduced damage done by minions (something that was round-about nerfed when they nerfed minion damage into the ground) to one that makes her permanently stealthed from level 1, but visible once she enters a certain radius of enemy vision.

 

 

Now instead of her punishing stun, she is gaining a stacking movement speed buff that grants her increased movement speed on spell hits, as well as an active sprint for a short distance. Her hate spikes remain but now have longer range and can hit more targets. Her ultimate has also been replaced completely. Now she uses a ranged AoE skill that grants her increased durability depending on how effectively you land it.

 

 

Overall the changes are set to reward smart and calculated gameplay. Eve will still play very similar, except now placement and timing will be everything as your enemies might catch a glimpse of you moving too close by. Skilled Eve players however will be able to counter jungle like bosses while keeping just enough fear in the enemy team to keep them on their toes, but without forcing them to tower hug or buy expensive vision wards to counter you.

 

 

Twitch

The goal of reworking Twitch was to create a character that was viable as a hybrid AD Ranged carry. However long duration stealth hindered this goal greatly because he had to be weakened below his fellow AD Ranged champions due to this hefty initiation advantage. The solution to this was to buff his harass, particularly the use of his stacking poison and expunge skill, in exchange for greatly shortening his stealth into tactical bursts.

 

 

Expunge (a skill that explodes opponents at range poisoned by Twitch’s strikes) will now deal additional damage and scale into late game on AD bonuses. Spray and Pray, Twitch’s barrage fire artillery ulti, now is more about strategically marking opponents for assassination rather than attempting to wipe entire parties with random AoE attacks. Although little information is released yet, Debilitating Poison is being replaced by a skill called Venom Cask that is planned to contribute more to a poison stacking style of gameplay. In addition Twitch is receiving plenty of base stat buffs, something this definition of a glass cannon could surely use.

 

 

Keep an eye out as we’ll be sending our League of Legends writer Hhean to give both champions in their reworked form full reviews in the coming months!