Riot Games' designer Matt "Phroxzon" Leung-Harrison announced two hotfixes for patch 13.3 in League of Legends. The developers nerfed Annie and Aurelion Sol, despite his long-awaited rework happening only a few days before. At this moment, the changes are already out in the game.
The drastic changes raised questions within the community, as the hero didn't even reach a 50% winrate. Another Riot Developer, Maxwell Perlman, explained the move. He says that with players mastering the hero, he would become too much of a force, turning to "terror on Monday."
For clarity sake, because people are feeling strongly that this may be too much of a nerf: most champions launch with a winrate in the low to mid 40% range, and as the champion is mastered, that winrate climbs over time.
ASol launching at closer to a 50% winrate with a ~40% banrate is spooky because if we left him in that state over the weekend, it is entirely possible he would break a 55% winrate by Monday and would be a terror.
It is theoretically possible that ASol has very little in the way of winrate growth and that his pay against is deeper than his play as, but champ release history suggests otherwise, as the only champion to ever do that is Neeko. So, if we did, in fact, overnerf him this weekend, I want to be clear about things. We did and do not intend to gut him. ASol is awesome, and we want people to get to play and enjoy him. The player response to him has been overwhelmingly positive, and we love that!
Secondly, this is a learning process - Aurelion Sol has a lot of unique things going on in his kit and tuning them throughout development has definitely been tricky. I have great confidence we have the necessary knobs to turn to get him where he should be in the long term
Aurelion Sol came out with patch 13.3 on February 9, and the hotfixes were announced on February 11. The champion received a first-of-a-kind rework: his appearance remained unchanged, but the gameplay was reinvented.