@RiotRepertoir -- Let's talk about the direction of the much-needed Nidalee rework

I made this thread in the forums, but I realized your posts on the subject were in the community beta, so maybe that's a better place to try to reach you. Heard you're the one fixing Nidalee. Good, she needs it.

1. You can't reduce Nidalee's spear's hitbox without drastically nerfing her. Still, her current hitbox/visual ratio cannot stand, because it frustrates players when they are visually certain they've dodged the spear, but they haven't. There are a couple threads on this -- SaltyTeemo4Life's seems to have grown the most traction.

Even if you see Nidalee as perfectly balanced, the least you can do is visually update the spears to reflect how big they are, because there's no philosophical justification for something as frustrating as getting chunked or killed by a Nidalee spear that anyone watching would say you'd dodged.

2. Nidalee's transform mechanic is archaic. As you observed, she doesn't need to use cougar as part of her regular kill pattern. That's simultaneously lame and sort of necessary, because she can't be a cougar pre-6.

She's the first champion created with multiple forms. There are two other champions with a shape-change available only at level 6 -- Quinn and Shyvana. Neither of their new forms grant new abilities, and neither of them are able to use their new form at will. The new form is basically a stronger version of them -- well, Quinn goes melee, but she gets way faster and can do that cool skystrike thing. Anyway, Nidalee's transform isn't like that at all.

Nidalee's transforming seems more on par with Jayce and Elise -- having six abilites and no true ultimate. The problem with that is that Nidalee is the only one of those three who must wait until level 6 to access these abilities. It actually makes little sense for her.

3. Her non-Javelin Toss abilities could use a look. Soraka has a .35 AP heal on a 20 second cooldown. Nidalee has a .7 AP heal on a 10 second cooldown. Nidalee's traps have an AP ratio comparable to Teemo's traps (.4 on Nidalee, .5 on Teemo) and Nidalee's come with a 40% MR reduction so they can potentially do more damage. The 40% armor shred means that with the cap of 40% armor/MR shred from the offensive mastery and Void Staff/Last Whisper, an enemy will effectively only have 36% of his defensive stats. A tank with 250 armor is reduced to 90 for the sake of actual damage reduction. Ouch.

These abilities are so good that most of the time you see Nidalee actually USE her cougar form only when a) she needs to move faster, either to chase or escape, or b) she needs to clear a wave. In combat, the majority of what Nidalee does is in human form. These abilities are also frustrating to play against -- her damage output from her spears alone is comparable to other mages, and yet she has so much utility in Bushwhack and Primal Surge to go along with it.

4. As an aside, her six abilities have three names. I got killed by a Javelin Toss, not by Javelin Toss/Takedown. She's not even level 6 yet, she didn't use Takedown. What is this?

With all that in mind, Nidalee needs a rework, and I'd like to make suggestions regarding the direction of that rework.

1. Fix her spears. Give them a new hitbox, and make sure the visual size of the spear matches the actual size of the hitbox. If you do nothing else, you MUST make sure, visually, the spears and the hitbox match.

That said, I strongly disagree with the direction you've expressed interest in pursuing with her spears: "At this rate, I wouldn’t expect Javelin Toss to undergo fundamental changes to its mechanics. It will almost assuredly remain a 'deals more damage at greater range' ability, and it will hurt to get hit by."

Why is that? That aspect of the spears has a lot of ridiculousness attached to it.

a) It makes little sense in her kit -- if she has to go into melee form to execute, champions are ironically the safest from her the farthest they are away. If she hits a long-range spear to bring you low, her only option to finish the kill is to try to hit another spear.

b) It makes even less sense in terms of the overall health of the game. Given the projectile speed, the spears that land at max range are the ones that champions have ample time to dodge. Sure, there's the possibility that the champion is rooted or stunned, but there's also a very high instance of spears hitting faraway champions by accident (or, more commonly, hitting champions who THOUGHT they'd dodged them). It also means that in sieges, Nidalee's damage is most insane when she's completely safe, and likely in the fog of war, so the spears are difficult to see coming. You guys nerfed the Jayce poke because having that much damage on an 8 second cooldown was sort of ridiculous. Nidalee's got more damage -- albeit single-target -- on a 6 second cooldown.

c) It makes even LESS sense in the reality of your game. Sure, I understand the spears are magical, but I'm still not sold on a spear that GAINS momentum after it's thrown. Its power and accuracy would decrease at a distance.

Overall, having the spears do more damage from farther away is a mechanic that sounds interesting, but in practice brings with it a large set of problems for both the player using it and the player having to adapt to it. Now, it's the single most defining part of Nidalee's identity, which would at first make someone want to avoid changing it. Don't go with that feeling -- why is it that a champion with a shapeshifting mechanic has so much of her identity wrapped up in a single ability in her default human form? Having the focus shifted away from that one ability and moved towards the shapeshifting would be a good thing.

With that in mind, I'd strongly consider making her spears do more damage up close, and have that damage start to decay around 600 range. Sure, this makes her poke less potent (but the game got better when you made Jayce's poke less potent), but it also makes her up-close danger much more significant, as she can chunk you hard while in Pounce range. If the damage doesn't decay too significantly, then her poke will still hurt, she'll just need to get a little get closer to chunk a carry down to 30% health with a single spear, which introduces some counterplay at that stage besides five banshee's veils.

(Another, less drastic possibility that occurred to me later was having the spear do damage like Elise's Venomous Bite -- doing flat damage, but also percent missing health damage that scales up. If a Nidalee spear did execute damage, then her kill potential is still quite high, but sieging, she won't bring a carry from full health to 1/3.)

2. Give her transform at level 1, like Jayce and Elise. This would be a huge buff all on its own, so it'd require the rebalancing of a real rework -- right now her largest weakness is the lack of wave clear pre-6 -- but it's a good idea. Nidalee was a transform champion made when you guys weren't sure how to do transform champions. Jayce and Elise are just more polished. Take some of the ridiculous power in Nidalee's human form abilities and move it to her Cougar stance, giving her more reason to use her Cougar stance in a prolonged fight.

This allows you to move more of her power freely into her cougar form without crippling her as a champion with a dismal pre-6 game. It allows you to shift (har har) the focus of her identity from spearchucker to shapeshifting predator. It also opens up new and exciting avenues of gameplay -- you'd see people taking her into the jungle, where she can be more of a prowling predator.

3. Envision her using her full combo. Primal Surge is great in lane, but when you think about it... she uses a heal in ranged form, then goes to melee? She's more likely to take damage in melee form, isn't she? Jayce and Elise have a nice flow to their combos, where one ability clearly follows the other and you can use all six in a single engage (and most likely get a kill). Nidalee should have something like that, even if for no other reason than "it's fun."

A better reason, though, is that if she can't use her full combo in one engage, then you have two possible instances. First, where she doesn't NEED her full combo to get a kill (the current state), meaning she's powerful enough to reliably get kills with one or two abilities (in this case, one), and then the rest of her kit is either useless, or extra, added power that does other things for the team. In that case, she's overloaded. The second instance is where she can't get kills without using her full combo (this sometimes happens, when she's underfed), which means she'll have huge difficulty getting solo kills, because her kit is too clunky to fit together. This is what happens when she lands a max range javelin to bring someone low but can't complete the kill because at max range, she's too far away to get to them in cougar form.