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Not being able to attack while Kayle is ulting one of her teammates feels awful

Jarmander·2/21/2019, 6:23:01 AM·5 votes·5,696 views

Not being able to auto attack while ulting herself already feels kind of clunky and disrupts the flow of Kayle's playstyle but I can definitely see how they didn't want an invulnerable Kayle having 3 seconds of auto attacks. From a balancing standpoint, I can understand the decision even if it feels awful. In this way, it felt like I was encouraged to ult my teammates instead of myself which was a pretty cool thought.

I was very unpleasantly surprised to find out that even if Kayle ults one of her allies, she still needs to wait until the swords rain down after a couple seconds before she can do anything. I really feel that this doesn't fit at all.

When you ult someone as Kayle (as the ult is right now), you have one or two motives:

  1. Save your ally/make them invulnerable
  2. Nuke the enemy team with a pseudo-Neeko ultimate

The constant is that Kayle needs to sacrifice her DPS and literally do nothing for a while if she chooses to save an ally meaning that Kayle has to choose between doing damage herself (auto attacking) or saving her allies (which locks her into doing nothing). That does not live up to the late game fantasy at all and it feels incredibly disruptive to play as Kayle, only to halt the flow of your auto attack barrage for a significant amount of time.

In fact, I'd say it's pretty plausible that there are tons of situations late game where it would be more beneficial for Kayle to simply not waste time saving her ally and get off 5 or 6 autos instead. So it's almost never ideal to ult either yourself or an ally as Kayle unless it's for the sake of the damage from the ultimate itself which really shouldn't be the case. IMO, the Kayle's ultimate is all about the invulnerability and that's what should be played around, not the damage aspect.

tl;dr Kayle's ultimate doesn't work well with her kit as it is. It completely interrupts the flow of Kayle's playstyle, especially in the late game (where it is supposed to all come together) and frankly just feels awful in comparison to everything else. You either ult a teammate, making yourself completely helpless for a couple seconds (which is a very long time in a teamfight) or you ult yourself and you don't get to do anything during the invulnerability (i.e. a tuned up master yi meditate).

What are your thoughts on this?

21 Comments

Sir Saltarin2/21/2019, 9:08:22 AM3 votes

But is needed to make her balanced, it's not healthy that her alone can make herself invulnerable and melt everyone without counterplay

I love the idea of her new R

KFCeytron2/21/2019, 6:55:29 AM1 votes

The wiki's PBE section says "ACTIVE: Kayle makes an allied champion or herself invulnerable for a few seconds. If Divine Judgement is self-cast, Kayle is additionally pacified for the duration." Does it also pacify her on ally cast?

JackMcSnipeyz2/21/2019, 9:15:25 AM1 votes

She didnt need that 500 damage 80% scaling nuke on her ult, if they keep the nuke they will have to gutt her DPS during it..

macspam2/21/2019, 9:48:32 AM1 votes

If it was just that the ult had a longish cast time, I could understand it. But if you look at the video it seems like about half the ult duration is the 'animation'. It's more cinematic, but unnecessary. Maybe if we didn't know of Kayle as a champ already, we wouldn't miss that idiosyncratic pattern of ulting and auto attacking. The R and W changes seem to push her to more of an enchanter and less of a split pusher a la Tryndamere

Zerenza2/21/2019, 1:47:35 PM1 votes

I'm gonna be real with you, they wanted kayle to keep her iconic ultimate but not be unfun to play against because of it. Tbh i hate kayle now when she hits late game, ults herself and shreds my whole team into ribbons, because there's not much you can do about it since she's invulnerable.

  1. You can't make yourself helpless while being invulnerable, your invulnerable, you cannot die.
  2. I don't want to have to deal with a Kayle ulted Yi diving my team while kayle casually helps him rip apart my team in 3 seconds.
  3. The damage on the Pacify portion makes up for the damage you'd be missing out on because you can't auto attack, this is called "Back loading" damage.

Basically Riot decided that they didn't want the kayle player to just be able to ult themselves to save themselves from burst while also being able to attack back, this way the player that tries to kill her lost out on killing her but didn't die themselves, which happened very frequently with old kayle and tbh it's super frustrating when your job is to kill the carry and you can't kill the carry because she's invulnerable. To add to this, when kayle reaches late game she's an absolute monster, the only way to stop her is to kill her but she has invulnerability, the fact she can't attack you adds a lot of counterplay and outplay potential because if she ults the second she see's an Evelynn she has a higher chance of dying since evelynn can chose not to attack, on the other side if kayle ults when she starts to take damage or, she's about to die, evelynn misses out on all her damage and more than likely the kill itself. Current kayle does not have this counterplay, because kayle can immediately ult and prevent all damage while simultaneously being able to dish out damage herself, by backloading her damage with an End Effect you also punish player's that over committed to killing kayle and failed to do so. If i run at kayle, miss out on all my damage and stay to try and kill her anyway, her ulti is gonna kill me and tbh i probably deserve it.

Baa Woof2/21/2019, 2:16:09 PM1 votes

Kindred wants to know your location.

JarodDempsey2/21/2019, 7:55:22 PM1 votes

i'd be much more happy with the ability if the aoe nuke and channel was removed and the cooldown was lowered to like 120/100/80 ad the mana was reduced to zero [slayer-jinx-wink]

Meep Man2/21/2019, 7:59:07 PM1 votes

You wanna be able to give an ally invincibility, have a giant AoE nuke attached to it (500 (+80% AP) (+100% bAD) is pretty big), and also basic attack during it as the character that seems to have the strongest basic attack in the game late game? I mean, just put it on your hyper aggo initiator and its easy damage with little risk.

OGCalamari3/27/2019, 6:50:55 AM1 votes

There should be a passive on it that lets allies auto attack when she reaches max level, or max level of the spell, this would also synergize with how she upgrades and transforms. OR it can be moderated by limiting the amount of auto attacks a champion can make before it prevents them from auto attacking lv 1 of ult allows 3 auto attacks (lv2 6aa lv3 9aa (or lv 3 unlimited aa ;) ). it just dosnt feel right that a champion made to atuo attack prevents herself from auto attacking. it just fls clunky to me, and it can occasionally fuck your teammates over. the vfx are cool though.

Frontline Fury2/21/2019, 6:29:19 AM1 votes

From a player's perspective i'd say that sounds terribly counterintuitive.

Gameplay-wise, however, the fact her ultimate is practically the same as a Neeko ult that DOESN'T reduce your movement speed means letting the late game hypercarry with undodgeable AOE true damage BASIC ATTACKS basic attack while casting/channeling it turn her into the de facto strongest champion in the entire game, to the point there's no counterplay whatsoever. Heck, an AOE nuke already has extremely little counterplay on a champion that can build mage items and massively buff their movement speed for an extended duration. Letting her basic attack WHILE completely invulnerable and charging up an AOE Nuke?

Just think about it for a second. Try to come up with a way to play against it that doesn't involve building Zhonya's hourglass, playing Elise or playing Sivir.

Stars Shaper3/27/2019, 7:18:31 AM1 votes

Her ult is a choice and has to feel like that.