Why Fiora's new kit is total garbage

The ultimate looks like crap imo. Total, unrelenting crap. In fact I daresay the entire kit will be crap because of it. Why?

Well it's kinda simple really. First, the AD steroid on W is gone, which means you don't win duels through raw stats now, which is a good change. So this means your dueling power comes from abilities, as well as the admittedly much stronger passive (old passive was weaker than a rejuv bead).

Second, in regards to those abilities, Q and W both look to be skillshots of some sort now. Cue the "make everything a skillshot!" meme. But more importantly: the cooldowns are astronomical! You really want to create a duelist champion with cooldowns that are totally incompatible with a sustained combat pattern? EVERY other duelist in the game would eat this kit for breakfast. Or more accurately a light snack.

Oh and speaking of sustained damage, let's talk about her new E. This skill looks more worthless than her old passive. 50% attack speed (which isn't great. it's ok, but not great)... for TWO attacks? That's so insignificant a duration as to be beneath notice. Based on those figures alone, this skill can be determined to be a slap in the face to fiora players. But then the first attack CAN'T EVEN CRIT? If it can't crit, it's not even an autoattack really, it's just a 1.0 AD skill, which is a pile of crap. But wait, you say, the second attack ALWAYS crits... but for drastically reduced damage until the very last rank? That's not a crit either, it's just bonus AD scaling on a stupid short duraion ability with a long cooldown. Plus Fiora builds attack speed and crit anyway! In fact, it will actually be more necessary to do so now since she has no long duration attack speed buff anymore (and even if the duration were longer, the buff itself sucks). You've essentially forced her to build more attack speed and crit to compensate, while giving her a skill that has no synergy or scaling with her crit chance at all. Oh, but it has a slow! Well you also put a slow on W that can potentially stun, so a slow on this cruddy E skill is redundant, putting the final nail in that abomination's coffin of total uselessness.

I actually like what you did with W... that's exactly where I would choose to put cc in Fiora's kit. Although the AP scaling is still totally worthless, and it would be much better as a duelist ability if it scaled with enemy AD, since all the best duelists use their enemy's strength against them, besting them with unmatched skill.

But the W and Passive are the ONLY compliments I have for this design. Double Dash from Q is gone, though I guess it's some kind of skillshot or something now? Great, so it can actually be used as an escape now right? Nope, in fact it's not even great as a gap closer. It is SO PAINFULLY SLOW it actually make's LeBlanc's dash and Zed's shadow cast look speedy. God those skills are slow to use, but they don't look NEARLY as slow moving to an observer. This skill looks AWFUL. It also loses the in-and-out laning pattern that makes her work in mid lane. It's damage is still negligible.

Oh, finally, we get to the best part. This. Freaking. Ultimate. So your passive ALREADY comes back up every time you proc it naturally. Having four procs lined up on a single target just isn't worth anything in light of that. THE ONLY THING IT DOES IS GIVE YOU THE CHANCE TO PROC A HEAL. A large heal, yes. But it is by far the stupidest thing I have ever seen forced onto a kit it has absolutely zero synergy with. Not one other skill in any way combos with this. Which brings up my final point. The ultimate idea that was originally tossed around on forums by Riot staff. Essentially, the idea was to have an ultimate wherein you could spam chain your abilities with almost no cooldown for a short space of time, requiring high mechanical skill to use effectively, but allowing you to more or less mimic her ultimate on live, except with actual windows of vulnerability instead of just being untargetable. This ultimate sounded like A LOT of fun, and kept the feel that Fiora players know and love, the sensation that as soon as that kill is available and you step out of line, it's time to wreck some face. Not only that, but most significantly of all, IT LOOKS LIKE HER COOLDOWNS IN THIS NEW KIT ARE BALANCED AROUND THIS CONCEPT. They are all so absurdly long, that it looks like these abilities were INTENDED to be used with a cooldown-lowering ultimate that would allow you to chain them together strategically. They are so long as to be impractical otherwise. You haven't created a duelist with these, you've created a poke champion who can only deal damage in melee range... let the worthlessness of that concept sink in for a moment.

This new ultimate, and in fact all of this new kit, seems like you are trying to force team utility onto a duelist identity, which is entirely antithetical need I remind you. And what happens when you proc that massive AoE heal? Bam, just like that, Fiora is worthless again and can be safely abandoned by her team, because now the sustained butt kicking damage isn't even there anymore. If you were going to put an aoe teamfight heal on any melee carry, it should have been Aatrox, who based on his lore IS supposed to be a teamfight oriented guy who rallies his allies to victory in the face of long odds.

In fact, given the way her kit works now, you might as well just build her full tank and use her exclusively as an aoe-teamfight heal cc bot. I really think you've managed to make her into a bruiser. I daresay you've completely broken this champion with this kit, in an entirely new and wholly unsatisfying way. Seriously, I am now firmly convinced (between this and the monstrosity that is new Ryze) that your update/balance teams have no damned idea what they are doing. Your company should seriously consider saving up the money for an actual team of chimpanzees to make your design decisions for you, since I hear they could at least theoretically draft up some Shakespeare given enough time. Which is more than I can say for your current staff, by the looks of it. If you're going to put this kind of crap on a champion that players have come to love despite a total lack of viability, you just shouldn't touch her at all. Let this crap die on PBE where it belongs.

God I didn't even realize how much I hated this kit until I started writing about it.