Sylas’ Ultimate Ability in League of Legends
If you’re an avid League of Legends player, chances are you’ve encountered Sylas’ wonky interactions with other champion’s ultimate abilities, where they don’t work as intended. Riot is working on fixing these “inconsistencies,” but they might take longer than you think.
Sylas’ Hijack Ultimate Ability
Unlike other champions, Sylas’ ultimate ability, Hijack, relies heavily on securing enemies’ ultimates, making the Demacian Mageseeker a great blind counter-pick to many League of Legends champions.
Community Outcry and Riot’s Response
One LoL player took to Reddit to flag the inconsistencies with Sylas’ ultimate and claimed it works differently with various champions. The League player explained that when Sylas steals Vayne’s ultimate, the Mageseeker can become invisible. However, when he steals Nasus or Illaoi’s ultimate, there is no cooldown reduction on his abilities, making it an unfair exchange with those champions.
“Can Sylas’ ult be more consistent, please? It feels like the most consistent part of Sylas’ ult is revealing whether an ult that empowers abilities is coded to work with an ability slot number or a specific ability name,” he asked the LoL developer.
Riot’s Plan for Fixing Sylas’ Ultimate
Norak further said that Riot is already coming up with a fix in the next 14.9 patch for one of the existing inconsistencies with Sylas’ ultimate and its interaction with Ahri’s ultimate, where it didn’t give resets from takedowns to the champion. After this, Riot will slowly work through all the ultimates of 168 champions to fix the issues with Sylas.
Riot also revealed the issue behind his inconsistency while stealing other ultimates in League of Legends. Norak said, “The issue isn’t design decisions most of the time; it’s that the ults weren’t designed with Sylas in mind.”
Sylas’ Relevance in the Game
“Most of the ults in the game are designed around the champions’ kits, and a very large number of them are designed with no AP ratio,” he went on to say. “This means by default Sylas’ ult steal mechanic would actually be pretty bad, and when that’s his signature ability that’s double bad,” focusing on how critical it is to fix Sylas’ ultimate to make him a relevant champion in the game.
The developer also believes that Sylas’s kit can be nerfed a little to compensate for his ultimate, which can become reliable in most cases, making him “feel healthier, more consistent, and more fun.”
Despite bad performances in the past, the champion is currently performing decently well in the ranked queue in the top and mid lanes while having a below-average win rate of 47.96 percent in the jungle across all Platinum and higher-ranked matches, according to stats aggregator site U.GG.