LoL Patch 13.18: Bard To Receive Huge Buffs Ahead Of…

Ahead of the League of Legends World Championship, Riot revealed plans for upcoming Bard changes. This could be a try to diversify the current bot lane meta and bring long-gone champions back to the surface. Read everything you need to know about the buffs here.

Lol bard best skins — Bard will receive some adjustments in the upcoming Patch 13.18 |©Riot Games

Riot Games continues its work on the best and hopefully most entertaining meta for the upcoming League of Legends World Championship in South Korea. The upcoming LoL Patch 13.18 plays an important part in this process. Now, new adjustments for the rarely played support champ Bard were revealed by the company.

This could be a sign, that the devs are trying to diversify the bot lane meta ahead of the most important LoL esport event of the calendar year. Especially the bot lane with their ADC and support champs was called stale by multiple esports personalities in the last couple of months.

LoL Patch 13.18: Devs Reveal Bard Changes

Bard is a very special champion within the League of Legends character roster. There is simply no comparable champion that can contribute roams, engages and disengages in this special kind of way than Bard. Unfortunately, while having a very entertaining to watch ability kit, he has been rarely seen on Summoner's Rift in the last couple of years.

So, ahead of Worlds 2023, Riot announced some buffs for our roaming god. According to the company employee "Riot Yelough", the goal is to increase the general feeling while playing bard in League of Legends,

Hey Bard players, have some QoL changes coming to the PBE today that @Quon_LoL, @RiotPhreak, and I cooked up. The goal of these changes is to make Bard generally feel better to play by improving the usability of W and enhancing his roaming fantasy when collecting distant chimes. pic.twitter.com/g7EMCElatP
— Max (Riot Yelough) (@MaxwellPerlman) August 29, 2023

To reach this goal, and to increase the roaming capabilities of the champ, Bard received the following changes on the PBE server,

Passive:

Out of combat movement speed from chime collection

Stack Maximum: 5 >>> 7
Stack Duration: 7 >>> 20

W-CARETAKER'S SHRINE

Spell now uses charges, maximum of 2
Cooldown / Ammo Time: 14 >>> 18
Shrine Charge Time to Full Heal: 10 >>> 5
Shrine Movement Speed: 30% decaying over 1.5 seconds >>> 20% + 2.5% per rank + 0.058% AP decaying over 1.5 seconds.

It will be interesting to see if it gets obvious during his time on the PBE server, that further changes are needed to bolster his rank within the meta. Also, the question is, if he is strong enough for a place in the Worlds meta even with these changes, We haven't seen Bard in a competitive environment for ages now and it's questionable if this was the case due to the bad stats or the champion design itself.

Bard 6 — Will these changes even make Bard playable on other positions as well? |©Riot Games

But for the solo queue, these changes might be great, especially for the higher Elos in League of Legends. Roaming champs with a lot of cc, strong movement, so many outplay options, and quite some damage output should be tempting for many supports.

Maybe he might even get played on other roles and positions in the game as well. So, these changes could really do it for Bard. It would be a shame if a Champ like this, with a unique design, would be forgotten like so many other characters.

Of course, we will keep you up-to-date, once more news about the Bard changes are surfacing.

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