LoL Patch 26.21: Riot Is Nerfing Ranged Carries Through Items, Not Champions

LoL Patch 26.21 went live on October 21, and the champion nerfs are not the story. Two item changes are.

Hubris and Gluttonous Greaves have both been pulled apart along a melee and ranged line. That shift affects more champions than every individual nerf in the patch combined, and it will not show up in any champion’s changelist.

The item changes that matter in LoL Patch 26.21

Riot named the problem directly in the notes: both items were overperforming on ranged characters.

• Hubris: base bonus AD goes from a flat 12 to 15 melee and 10 ranged. Bonus AD per stack goes from a flat 3 to 3 melee and 2 ranged.
• Gluttonous Greaves: total cost rises from 1000g to 1100g.

Hubris is now two different items depending on who buys it. A fully stacked melee user gains more than before. A ranged user gains less on the base and a third less per stack.

The Greaves change looks small and is not. Riot says the boots overperform for marksmen even at very few stacks, which means the value was arriving immediately. Adding 100g does not reduce the ceiling, it delays the purchase, and a delayed boot spike in bot lane is a real tempo loss in the window where ADCs decide games.

Miss Fortune got paid back

Watch who Riot compensated.

Miss Fortune picked up a Make It Rain buff of 20 damage at every rank and a Bullet Time crit damage increase from 130% to 145%, with better bonus crit scaling on top. Riot says plainly that this is compensation for the Hubris nerf.

That tells you which champions Riot thinks the item change actually hurts. If your ADC was not on that compensation list, you absorbed the nerf.

Caitlyn and Jinx nerfs

The two dominant marksmen both come down in LoL Patch 26.21, and the Caitlyn change is more interesting than it looks.

Caitlyn loses the top end of her Headshot scaling, from 60-100% AD down to 60-80%, with both crit scalings dropping from 1% to 0.8%. In exchange her Q gains a lot: 50/90/130/170/210 becomes 50/95/140/185/230.

That is not a nerf so much as a relocation. Riot has moved her power out of full-build headshots and into her laning phase. She will bully harder at level 9 and matter less at three items.

Jinx takes a flat base stat cut: 3.25 AD per level drops to 3, and base health goes from 630 to 610. No compensation anywhere. Riot wants her snowball to start slower.

Tristana loses early Q attack speed, from 60/75/90/105/120% to 40/60/80/100/120%. Riot’s wording is unusually pointed, calling her level 1 pattern “a pretty low gameplay and off flavour way for her to succeed”.

Replay downloads are now capped

This is the one to read if you use third-party tools.

Replay downloads are limited to 10 per hour starting in LoL Patch 26.21. You can still pull your own replays and those of friends and other players, but the hourly ceiling is now fixed.

Riot’s stated reason is worth quoting: the limit exists to stop “large-scale abuse of downloaded replays by bad actors using vibecoded apps to scrape thousands upon thousands of replays”.

That is a notable sentence to find in official patch notes, and it also marks a change of approach. Riot originally planned to make replays private in Patch 26.20, then delayed that change. A rate limit is the softer version: creators keep working, scrapers do not.

League Classic adds four more champions

Mordekaiser, Yorick, Hecarim and Lucian join League Classic in their old kits, following the five added in Patch 26.20.

• Mordekaiser returns in his 2010-2015 form, with health costs on every ability and an Ultimate that turns a fight into a 6v4
• Yorick is the 2011-2016 version, summoning ghouls off every cast and reviving dead allies
• Hecarim arrives close to his modern self, since he has changed little since 2012
• Lucian is the newest addition at 2013, and critically has 550 attack range

Riot also reverted every pre-launch nerf to Kassadin, describing him as back to “full 90% ban rate power”. Atma’s Impaler returns to 2% max health conversion.

Worth doing soon rather than later, given Classic rotates out in January. Riot says more champions arrive in 26.22 and 26.23.

Everything else worth knowing

The rest of LoL Patch 26.21, in short.

• Jungle nerfs: Lee Sin, Nidalee, Rammus and Wukong all come down, with Lee Sin losing W cooldown and R damage
• Jungle buffs: Taliyah gets damage and a 225% monster modifier, Xin Zhao gets better scaling
• Freed by the Worlds patch lock: Azir, Orianna and Ryze all get buffs that could not ship earlier
• Sion and Nunu: both get real power back, Sion through health per level and Ultimate damage, Nunu through a large R damage increase
• Taric and Twisted Fate: spells now fire correctly on untargetable allies, a fix dating back to the old Master Yi funnel era
• ARAM Mayhem: Journey to Stardom arrives with band Headliners, a progression track and roughly 35 new augments

True Damage Know My Name skins for Ekko, Akali, Qiyana, Senna and Yasuo release on October 21, with a Prestige Ekko.

Does any of this affect Worlds?

No. Riot locked the competitive patch before 26.21, which is exactly why Azir, Orianna and Ryze could be buffed now.

The teams in our Worlds 2026 Swiss Stage guide are playing an older build, so none of these changes show up in Allen this week.

The next one will matter more. Patch 26.22 brings the Mel rework, which removes the reflect from her W entirely..