Here Is What To Expect From the League of Legends Patch 26.17

Ben Boland Published 20/08/2026

It’s less than a week until the release of League of Legends Patch 26.17, and with this patch comes some significant nerfs to popular champions, item adjustments, and targeting roaming supports as mage bottom lanes dominate the meta. While there is plenty to unpack in this week’s patch from Riot Games, two champions, Vayne and Xerath, have received the biggest nerfs across the board.

Here are some of the biggest takeaways from the LoL Patch 26.17 notes:

Vayne and Xerath On The Chopping Block

For a while, Vayne in the top lane has been dominant in League of Legends. With mages shifting into the bottom lane, top laners have found Vayne to be one of the better champions to utilize against bruisers and tanks in this meta. Like with mages bot, ADC’s going top lane fill a similar purpose, adding variety to the lane.

While Vayne’s power remains similar in the latter stages of the game, Riot believes her early laning phase could be weaker. With the current itemization, primarily Experimental Hexplate, Vayne deals out a lot of damage while remaining relatively tanky — not something you would generally attribute to an ADC.

With Xerath, he is receiving a more generic nerf that should slightly stunt his power levels. According to Riot, Xerath was a large contributor to mages in the bottom lane. Additionally, Xerath has been performing very well in the mid lane, making his presence that much stronger. Therefore, Riot is hitting base Q damage as well as his base AR.

How will this impact professional play?

For Xerath, this has no impact as the champion has hardly featured. As for Vayne, this should ultimately take her out of the top lane; with enemy top laners being tankier by design after the nerfs, it will feel harder for Vayne to get as much of a lead as she has garnered in pro play.

Image via @RiotPhroxzon on X.

Riot Gives Update on Roaming Supports

Since the introduction of mages in the bottom lane, supports have often been found leaving lane, opting to affect the map and leaving their carry to farm up on their own. And even if this means having less XP early on, LoL’s catch-up mechanics mean they aren’t losing out on much as the game progresses.

Matt Leung-Harrison, Lead Gameplay Designer for LoL, said on X: “For the limited number of Pro games on 26.16, we’ve been seeing good movement on roaming supports and expect it to trickle down to solo queue over time (especially as players find the strategy less effective over time) — we’ll still continue to monitor this and assess whether stronger swings are necessary, though we don’t want to over-punish regular roaming and a small amount of unconventional roaming strategies is reasonable, so long as they don’t become broadly optimal.”

What Does This Mean For Esports?

Roaming supports are here to stay, at least for the time being. Riot often makes major changes to the game ahead of the World Championship. But at least for now, roaming supports are going to stay in the meta. This should mean we see a wider variety of champions played, both in pro play and in solo queue, as the world catches up to the strategy.

Ahead of this patch release, we have also looked at which teams should be panicking ahead of Worlds.

Featured image credit: Riot Games

Ben Boland

About Ben Boland

Ben is the Lead Editor at Win.gg, bringing a decade of iGaming industry experience having worked for both the operator and affiliation sides. With a formal journalism background, he is responsible for ensuring that every piece of content that we publish is relevant, accurate and well-written. In his own time, he enjoys playing video games and especially enjoys Rockstar titles, considering Red Dead Redemption 2 the finest title ever made. He has also spent a lot of time playing GTA V over the years and is fascinated by how streaming is changing the landscape of the industry.

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