How is everyone on this fine patch day? Good? We are good as well. Excellent.
We were taught to be polite when delivering tough news, so now that pleasantries are out of the way, here we go: back in the foreword of patch 5.2 we mentioned that 5.2 and 5.3 were going to be our Deathfire Grasp-removal patches, but now that we've been hard at work, we realized we could use an extra cycle to build confidence. So that means we've delayed a few dudes we promised would come in 5.3, including Veigar, Mordekaiser, Katarina (more on her below), and a new +120 AP item to replace the gap left in DFG's wake. We're aiming for 5.4 and are expecting to stick the landing (except maybe the new item, as it's a bigger project and might take longer!).
As an aside, we've been keeping a close eye on all champions who were affected by the passing of Deathfire Grasp and haven't seen a real impact on performance. We're not saying this to justify the removal of an item that many felt were important in their builds (in other words, we're not dismissing your feedback!), but it's an interesting tangent we wanted to explore.
While we're pretty certain at high levels the strategic removal of DFG hurt players who could utilize it properly, a proportionally equal number seem to be benefitting from finding alternative builds that don't rely on using an active. We looked into it and, given the low (low) percentage of players who use their actives, it seems there's a tipping point where replacing your DFG with a different AP item (try a Morellonomicon or two (or five)) nets roughly equal results. Once again, this is probably different at high levels of play but it's true from a broad statistical perspective, so here we are again, talking about statistics.
But we'll repeat: the reasoning behind that info-dump was not to justify the change, just to give some background on the complexities we deal with. One thing we do agree with is that there needs to be another +120 ability power item for endgame mages, and we're investigating that space as we speak. Rather, as you read.
After this long, rambling foreword, what's all this mean about this patch? Just that we're going pretty light, with changes aimed at a few outliers in competitive and normal play (oh dear Ahri). I guess you could say this patch's narrative is defined by what's not in there (hence we spent four paragraphs talking about that), but now you can charge up to 2 wards in an upgraded yellow trinket, so that's very cool. See you next patch!"