Teamfight Tactics' 9.15 patch went live today, bringing some major changes to its strategic meta along with some hilarious, unintended buffs that have turned some already-powerful champions into ungodly harbingers of complete obliteration. Though a hotfix is already on the way, it's chaos right now in TFT—and I for one am having a great time exploiting it while I can.
The 9.15 patch brings many exciting changes to Teamfight Tactics, including much-needed buffs to Knights, Guardians, and Noble champions. Meanwhile, Void champions have been reworked so that they now deal True damage—effectively letting them tear through enemy defenses so long as you can field enough of them to trigger the synergy. But players have also noticed that many of these buffs might've gone a little too far, paving the way for some ridiculously overpowered teams.
"TFT is officially broken right now," reads one of the top-voted threads on the subreddit today where players are gathering to lament the bugs.
Let's start with my personal favorite. Though the Frozen Heart item wasn't changed in this patch, players have discovered that stacking multiple versions of it in 9.15 can all but shut down an enemy team. When a champion is equipped with this item, adjacent enemies lose 25 percent attack speed—but there's a multiplicative bonus to stacking Frozen Hearts, and with even just two of them you can reduce enemy attack speeds so much that it feels like they're outright stunned. What's worse is that Assassins like Pyke, who leap over and dash through enemy teams, can easily apply this debuff to the entire team. I just played a game with Pyke and got lucky enough to equip him with two Frozen Hearts and more than once my opponent had to sit helplessly while his units attacked in slow-motion. It's ridiculously powerful.
Compound that with the new Void synergy that lets them tear through enemies despite their defenses, and it's easy to quickly overwhelm the other team while they're unable to fight back. If you're making use of Void champions, you might as well pick up Cho'Gath, a Void Brawler. Players recently discovered that stacking ability-enhancing items like Rabadon's Deathcap makes his special ability incredibly powerful. Over on Reddit, user FAQMaster posted a video of his Cho'Gath doing an unprecedented 16,100 damage from a single ability, nearly disintegrating the enemy team.
We're going to prep a hotfix for as soon as possible (could be this afternoon) to address the following:*Frozen Heart stacking too strong*Akali Spell crits 100% of the time*Reverting Cho's spell damage buffWill post again once it's live.July 31, 2019
The chances of getting two Frozen Hearts and two Rabadon's Deathcaps are extremely rare, but even without a perfect setup it's fun to see how broken TFT's meta is right now. It's easy to combine all of these champions into a single team. MundaneNecessary1 on Reddit spells out a powerful team composition that includes Kha'zix, Kassadin, Cho'Gath, Akali (who is also busted with a 100 percent crit chance), Pyke, and whatever other champions you might want. That not only gets you the Void synergy but an Assassin and Ninja synergy. If you get the Frozen Heart and Rabadon's Deathcap, you can easily sweep the game.
A lot of players are staying away from TFT's ranked mode for now. In the few games I've played, multiple people were working towards this exact same build. Given how broken it is, losing to it isn't fun.
Riot is working on a hotfix that could be deployed as early as this afternoon. TFT's lead game designer took to Twitter to announce that the fix is incoming, saying that it will specifically address how strong Frozen Heart is, remove Cho'Gath's spell damage buff, and fix Akali's broken crit chance.
While many are upset that these issues have even made it into the game, I'm having a blast experimenting with them while I can. Since it launched a month ago, Riot Games has been steadily updating Teamfight Tactics and it's fun to see the meta shift week to week—even if those shifts are sometimes terribly violent and frustrating.
Speaking of updates, Teamfight Tactics is also getting four new champions that you can read about here.
