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As expected Smolder has become much more powerful with the new Essence Reaver and increased minion counts. We want to make sure Smolder’s strong late-game damage has durability tradeoffs, even when buying the occasional HP item.
The baby dragon has been absolutely blasting his opponents since getting his hands on Deathfire Touch. Included in these changes are a continuation of the latest nerf's push towards bringing him back into primarily critical strike builds rather than just Essence Reaver into bruiser.
Smolder's early game has been bolstered significantly after gaining access to Deathfire Touch. While we’re nerfing DFT, we still expect it to be his best keystone, so we’re also tapping him down to compensate. Update: Smolder continued to skyrocket in winrate this patch despite the previous nerfs as players adapted builds. We’re nerfing him again and will continue to monitor his performance after the Black Cleaver and Deathfire Touch interaction is changed in the next patch.
Smolder, like Gangplank, stands to gain a lot of power from Essence Reaver's changes in this patch so we're taking a swing at how strongly his Q scales with critical strike purchases.