One person mentioned that Shyvana shouldn’t be able to cast multiple times (I haven’t played Set 4.5 before, just played one game of Revival to try this out) and she definitely casts multiple times with this build so it might be a bug with Blue Buff. I HEAVILY doubt it would classify as an “exploit”, which carries specific meaning from Riot’s perspective. From all the times I’ve heard clarification on bugs vs. exploits in the past, this is how I’ve understood it:

– Bugs are classified as unintended behaviors in the game that a player would naturally engage with. They can be either beneficial or detrimental. In this case, it is natural to place items on Shyvana. It is expected player behavior to look and see what is the best items on her via a stats website and see Blue Buff is the best and place it on her. Therefore, even if Blue Buff is bugged for a beneficial interaction with Shyvana, Riot wouldn’t expect players to never do it because it’s unrealistic for every player to know that it causes unintended behavior.

– Exploits are classified as unintended BENEFICIAL behaviors in the game that a player must act in an UNNATURAL way to take advantage of. A clear-cut example would be you are required to buy Shyvana chosen, sell it, buy it back again, add the Blue Buff, then remover it, and add it back again for the bug to happen. Very few if ANY players would naturally do this. Therefore, it’s pretty clear that any player who does this repeatedly across games is exploiting the bug.

Here’s a grey area example of an exploit:

Let’s say that the Blue Buff interaction only works if you remover the Shyvana every round and equip the Blue Buff AFTER she transforms the first time. This is possible in the revival set because all players are given a golden remover. I would treat this as an exploit, but it might be possible Riot could classify this as just a bug because it MIGHT be natural for a player to think that Blue Buff is supposed to work after transformation (i.e: there has been some precedence of equipping items to champions AFTER they transform in the past such as Corrupt Vampiric Scepter).

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However, all of these examples are moot because this build works without doing anything special. The only reason I found out about it was looking up stats via the MetaTFT explorer which is a normal player behavior. I do think there is a good chance it’s a bug though since Blue Buff got reworked since the last set revival, so it would make sense that they weren’t aware of how it might impact certain champions that are only meant to cast once (I don’t know how Shyvana is supposed to behave normally). Regardless, I’m pretty sure this would classify as a “bug” and not an “exploit” based on Riot’s previous wording.