Given on Phreak’s recent video, encouraging players to provide feedback on how to balance champs, I felt compelled to offer some suggestions that could help buff the champion for his toplane role, but without really influecing his jungle performance (as he is pro-jailed in this role). My main suggestions relate to how his passive works and how adjusting some numbers can help his toplane performance, especially his overall laning phase. This might not be enough to fix the champion, but are just some suggestions that may help.

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Overview of the passive: Wukong gains 5 − 9 (based on level) bonus armor and bonus health regeneration equal to 0.35% of his maximum health, increased by 50% for each stack up to a maximum of 30 − 54 (based on level) bonus armor and 2.1% maximum health regeneration.

How does this work? Wukong gets 5/9 armor and 0.35% of his max health bonus regen, with these effects being always active. Then, when he damages an opponent he gets 2.5/4.5 armor and 0.17% of his max health, which stacks up to 10 times (25/45 armor / 1.7% regen) - thus in total getting 30/54 and 2.1%.

1) Reducing the passive’s stacks from 10 to 3 (or less) will help with short trades and more overall sustain during the laning phase.

One of the biggest issue in toplane is that wukong does not really get the full effect of his passive during short trades while contesting minions. This reduces the overall amount of sustain he gets throughout the laning phase, which makes it more difficult to farm and contest minions, as he will always fall behind the opponent in terms of remaining health. At most you get to stack the passive 3 or 4 times and thus only getting less than half the value during short trades. His sustain is already low as it is when compared to pretty much every other toplaner in the game right now, and this is one if not the biggest issue he has during the laning phase.

However if the passive was changed to give the same value with 3 stacks, instead of 10, it would mean wukong would get more sustain from short trades, which would overall increase his chances of being able to contest the lane. For example: the base stat at level one should be 7.5 armor and 0.52% hp regen, with each subsequent stack giving the same value, for a maximum of 3 stacks. This would allow him to quickly stack up and get full value in a much shorter time.

Will this buff Jungle Wukong? —> it will not, as his passive sustain tends to be fully stacked during jungle clears, and thus reducing the amount of stacks won’t really change his sustain in the jungle. But it will make toplane wukong stronger when trading with enemies.

2) Increasing the value of HP scaling on his passive (from 2.1% back to 3% or more) has benefits on item viability.

This is a nerf he got during patch 12.14 last year, one of the first attempts at nerfing his jungle performance. However, this was done before the jungle changes of this season, and all of the subsequent nerfs he got in recent patches. To be fair, this nerf itself didn’t do much to stop jungle wukong, and actually hurt top a bit more. This would just be a number change, so it can be adjusted easily, but the current value seems quite low, and considering all the massive buffs many toplane champs had, it would seem like an adequate time to undo this nerf.

Will this buff Jungle Wukong? —> only slightly, but it won’t really change his clearing speed by much.

3) Adding back MR to his passive to counter hybrid magic damage.

There is a lot of hybdrid physical/magic damage built into toplane champions right now: some bruiers like Atrox, Jax and Irelia have some manner of magic damage in their kit. There are also more AP bruisers that have been buffed such as Volibear and Rumble.

Before the mid-scope update his passive used to grant Magic resistance, aside from armor. While this was changed in favour of giving him passive hp regen, I do believe having a certain amount of magic resistance will make him a little bit stronger against the increasing amount of magic damage that toplane has received in the last season. The value can be lower than the armor from his passive, for example 2 magic resistance per 5 or so on.

Because the full value of magic resistance will only be active while stacked, this means wukong won’t really see much improvement when poked by long-range spells (from mages and such), but will be active while wukong is fighting or trading with an enemy mele who has in-built magic damage.

Will this buff Jungle Wukong? —> only when facing opponents, but won’t affect his clear speed.

4) Giving him higher HP growth

This is not necessarily related to his passive, although it would affect its value. Wukong in itself is a team fighter, and he currently has lower max hp than most other divers, such as Camille, Riven, Pantheon, Irelia, Jarvan, etc. His current health value is 610–2293 which at max level is about 200 less hp than the average diver. This is just a recommendation, that some of his base stats should be adjusted to more resemble similar champions of the same class.

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