New lethality item Profane Hydry to make assassins deadlier in LoL season 2024.
Ever since Riot released the gameplay trailer for League of Legends season 2024, the hype has continued to skyrocket. Usually, preseason changes bring something new to the game. One of the factors of success for LoL’s immaculate longevity is Riot’s consistency every single year in updating the game. There’s always something fresh going on in the game.
This year, however, the list of changes is long enough to deplete your pen’s ink. Map symmetry, new Baron and Shelly, Void Objectives, etc, are some of the highlights. There’s another massive one, though. It’s the removal of Mythic items and adding new ones for almost every class. Cryptbloom, Malignance, etc for mages, Terminus for ADCs, and plenty of others for the rest of the classes.
Profane Hydra is one of the notable items among the new additions for assassins. And it’s a big one. In this article, I will be trying to write about how it works.
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Profane Hydra Item Description
- Total Cost: 3400 gold
- Item Recipe: Tiamat + The Brutalizer + 863 gold
- 60 Attack Damage
- 18 Lethality
- 20 Ability Haste
- Active – Heretical Slash: Deal 65% of total Attack Damage as physical damage to nearby enemies. This damage increases to 97.5% of total Attack Damage as physical damage to enemies below 30% health.
- Passive – Cleave: Attacks deal 40% AD (melee) / 20% AD (ranged) damage to other units within 450 units of the target hit.
One of the interesting things to notice in the recipe is that the epic item ‘The Brutalizer’ is back. Also, despite having lethality stats, it doesn’t contain the serrated dirk. It is quite unique in that regard.
How Lethal is Profane Hydra?
If you look at the cost, it’s kinda expensive. Moreover, 60 AD with 18 Lethality and 20 Ability Haste doesn’t seem worth the investment since you have cheaper alternatives like Umbral Glaive, which has similar stats but is much cheaper.
Here comes its active and passive effects.
Active – Heretical Slash
As written already, the 65% bonus damage to nearby damage is a small AoE damage, much like Goredrinker’s active. It has a 10-second cooldown, and with item haste, it can be even lower. But it gets borderline OP when the enemy champion is below 30% HP. Then, the damage increases to 97.5%. That’s almost as good as a double incremental on your AD.
Suppose you have 250 AD on your Champion. With the active against a low target, you will do a bonus of 243.75 damage. That’s almost half the health bar of an early-mid-game marksman.
Not to mention, this scales more as the game progresses. In late-game, with other items and base stats scaling, you can practically kill any non-armor target in seconds. It’s like a Jhin 4th shot embedded in an item.
Passive – Cleave
If that wasn’t enough, there is another trick up its sleeve. This ‘cleave’ passive allows your champion to deal 40% AD to other units around the target you hit and 30% if you use a ranged champion. This is the same passive as other hydra items (Ravenous and Titanic Hydra), consistent with its name.
In my opinion, the active of this item seems a bit overturned, along with the raw stats and the hydra passive. Yes, it’s a 3400g item, but on assassins such as Zed, Nocturne, and Kha’zix, this item will be slipper op in a lot of team comps.
However, it is worth mentioning that other classes are also getting similar types of ‘overtuned’ items. So, in the end, it may balance things out. But I feel like games will become even more fast-paced now, undoing some of the small changes brought about by the durability patch. Only time will tell what Riot is cooking.
Release Date of Profane Hydra in LoL
All the new items, including this, are set to be released in early January 2024 as patch 14.1 is deployed on all live servers. Currently, you can try out the PBE 13.24 for preseason to check all the upcoming changes yourself.
