It’s demon time! Swain is receiving a sweeping update aimed at making him much more consistent and giving him more personal agency over his successes and failures. He’s receiving this increase in personal agency largely through significant buffs to Nevermove’s accuracy and an overall shift in power from his ultimate toward his base kit.
Death’s Hand will be doing about 10% more damage at long range and have a lower mana cost to make those ranged trades better. These buffs are being compensated with a small decrease to his melee range damage output, meaning Swain won’t be so strongly defined by his best and worst matchups.
Vision of Empire is being compressed to not require skill rank-ups as strongly as before, primarily through front-loading the slow and reveal duration. It’s meant to still be a competitive option to max second, but should leave room for Nevermove’s increased importance.
Nevermove’s changes are the most important in this patch. Its acceleration has been re-implemented with more modern missile tech, removing randomness from its travel time. Its return is now more consistent and substantially faster, providing Swain much better access to crowd control. Its damage is also being shifted entirely into the explosion, which should make it better at damaging enemy champions. This increase in expected output per cast has necessitated nerfing its cooldown and his passive healing to compensate.
Demonic Ascension is meant to represent less of Swain’s overall power, allowing Swain to rely more on his stronger basic abilities. The chief nerf here is to cooldown. Though it now scales plainly with ability haste, the overall cooldown is substantially longer and the healing and damage are generally weaker. But for the Swains who are strong enough to take over games, they’re getting multiple Demonflares per ultimate! He’s not meant to access these extra casts every time he transforms, but when Swain starts really carrying, that’ll come with some extra spice.
Our hope with these changes is that Swain feels like a much more well-rounded and fulfilling champion to play, a centerpiece battlemage who can wear down his opposition, sustain himself from his success, and still strategically aid his teammates across the map.