Did Hecarim Get Buffed in 26.17? What Riot Pulled From PBE

Short answer: no. Rampage [Q] is untouched in Patch 26.17, with the same 4 second cooldown and the same 0.75 second refund per stack it had in 26.16. The confusion comes from Riot's own highlights graphic, which files Hecarim under Buffs while the written notes never mention him. The buff was real, though. It lived on the PBE for about six hours before Riot deleted it, and we caught the numbers on the way past.

Patch 26.17

The Hecarim Buff That Wasn't

Season 16

Short answer: no. Rampage [Q] is untouched in Patch 26.17, with the same 4 second cooldown and the same 0.75 second refund per stack it had in 26.16. The confusion is Riot's own. This patch's highlights graphic files Hecarim under Buffs, and the written notes never mention him at all.

The buff was real, though. It sat on the PBE for about six hours on August 19 before Riot deleted it, and it never came back. Here's exactly what was in it, and why the number that went down was still a buff.

What 26.17 actually did to Hecarim

Nothing. We compared the two versions field by field, then went further and read the numbers straight out of an installed 26.17 client. Rampage [Q] costs 4 seconds at every rank, and the stack it gains on hit still takes 0.75 seconds off that cooldown, still capping at three. The PBE numbers are nowhere in the shipped game. Everything else that differs between 26.16 and 26.17 is cosmetic bookkeeping inside Riot's data.

His patch history page agrees. 26.17 isn't on it.

Here's what was on the PBE before they pulled it

Our PBE tracker caught the first 16.17 build at 1:30pm Eastern on August 19. Two numbers had moved:

Rampage [Q]	26.16 live	PBE, Aug 19
Cooldown	4s	3.25s
Refund per stack	0.75s	0.5s

Why the number going down is still a buff

A smaller refund looks like a nerf, and on its own it would be. The two only ever apply together, though, and the cooldown you actually wait through is the base minus whatever the stacks have paid off. Run all four stack counts and the shape shows up:

Stacks	26.16 live	PBE, Aug 19
0	4.00s	3.25s
1	3.25s	2.75s
2	2.50s	2.25s
3 (max)	1.75s	1.75s

Faster at every stack count except the last, where both land on 1.75 seconds. That's deliberate. Hecarim's uptime once he's rolling has never been the problem. The ramp is: those first casts on a fresh camp, or the opening seconds of a fight, where the cooldown is still long. This bought him the ramp and left the ceiling exactly where it was.

Six hours

By our next capture at 7:30 that same evening it was gone. Three more PBE builds went out before the patch shipped and none of them brought it back.

That makes Hecarim the only champion who turned up on the 16.17 PBE and didn't make the patch. The first build carried changes for 47 champions and the last one for 60. Every other name survived.

It isn't waiting in the wings for next patch either. The 16.18 PBE client and the live 26.17 client ship a byte for byte identical Hecarim file, so whatever Riot was testing on August 19, they haven't picked it back up.

So why does the graphic say Buffs?

Riot builds that image from the change list as it stands the day the art gets made, and the revert landed after that. The written notes come later, and they're the ones that match the game you log into. When the two disagree, believe the notes.

Read next

The rest of the patch did ship. Our 26.17 patch notes rundown has every champion and item change, Hecarim excepted.

Want the next one before it lands? The PBE tracker diffs the test server against live every half hour, which is how a six hour change gets caught at all.

Chasing one champion through the years instead? Champion patch history holds every buff and nerf back to 2009.