League of Legends’ newest champion, Sylas, has now been disabled globally across all regions in competitive play because of some game-breaking bugs that were encountered recently. This was announced by the LEC’s operations lead on Twitter. At this stage, it’s uncertain how long the Sylas global disable is going to last.
There have been a number of issues with Sylas in pro play. The most publicized instance was last week’s LPL Spring game between Bilibili Gaming and SinoDragon, where there had to be a remake because SinoDragon’s top-laner realized that Sylas’ ult wasn’t actually able to steal his opponent’s. Sylas was soft-banned then for the rest of the series.
Now, it appears that Riot has looked into the champion more and issued a notice about this Sylas global disable on Twitter. The tweet from Maximilian Schmidt, who is also the EU Esports Operations Lead, notes that European League of Legends Championship Series (LEC) teams were previously made aware of the possibility that this champion would be taken away. In particular, Fnatic has used Sylas to great effect in their last victories against Rogue and Schalke 04, so this ban is almost assured to have an impact on their strategy coming into their matches this week.
However, it’s not only the LEC that is going to be affected. Cloud 9 has been using Sylas to great effect in the North America League of Legends Championship Series (LCS) recently against Counter Logic Gaming and the Golden Guardians. It’s unclear from Riot’s tweet whether teams from other regions were also given advance notice about the Sylas global disable. With Cloud 9 going up against another top-performing team in Team Liquid this week, this ban has arguably come at an inopportune time.
Sylas has been incredibly strong since release despite bugs here and there because of his game-changing ability to utilize the ults of other champions. Now that Riot is taking him out of the picture, potentially past patch 9.5, to iron out any issues with his kit, we could see a potential shift in the mid-lane meta as pro player picks from earlier in the season re-appear. It’s unclear as to how long Sylas will be out of commission for, and it’s also unclear from Riot’s response to this whether there are any further game-breaking issues with the champion besides the inability of his ult to currently proc properly in certain match-ups. However, like in any MOBA, a shifting meta is as good a time as any to shake up competitive standings; it looks to be an interesting few weeks of competitive play in League of Legends as teams ride out the Sylas global ban.
More: Riot Games Executive Responds to Sexist Work Culture Allegations
Source: Riot / Twitter
