Recently, Riot Games announced a major test for the champion Pyke on the PBE server. Specifically, Pyke was given two new features: first, the ability to instantly execute wards when allies are nearby. The second was an increase in the execute threshold on his ultimate, Death from Below, scaling up whenever Pyke kills champions, minions, or epic monsters.
Right after these features hit the PBE, a wave of strong criticism erupted. Players argued that these changes only made Pyke more toxic without addressing his ability to play Mid lane. In fact, the ward execute feature made Pyke’s Mid lane map control even stronger, especially when paired with powerful junglers like Lee Sin or Xin Zhao.
Furthermore, the scaling execute threshold on his ultimate made Pyke’s gameplay unreasonably strong. Typical assassins need to land their abilities carefully to secure kills, but this new feature allowed Pyke to finish off enemies with just his ultimate, even if his other skills missed. This clearly felt unfair and was a change Riot shouldn’t have made.
As a result, Riot’s new features faced overwhelming negative feedback. This forced Riot Games to remove all the new Pyke features just two days after they were introduced. Currently, Pyke on the PBE server has reverted back to his official live version.
This is likely another lesson for Riot when adding new features or trying to tweak champions. It’s a bad idea to make an already powerful and unbalanced skill even stronger, which just doesn’t make sense.
