Please simplify Cassiopeia (excessively long rant, sorry)

Slightly different angle to the "I don't like the rework" threads but one main problem I have with Cass that isn't often brought up is simply how headache-enducing her kit now is. Cass has one of the highest skill caps in the game - her win rate was poor pre-rework and that was largely because she was very hard to play. But while Cass was tough to play then, the micro-managing present in her kit now is quite ridiculous.

Riot Stashu has stated that the primary reason for both the rework and its direction was to remove power from her DOTs (because they were not "clear" enough apparently and also were not "satisfying") and instead place it on the one basic ability of hers that wasn't poison (Twin Fang, the single target nuke). They also didn't like her being a lane bully, so wanted to destroy her lane phase and make her a hypercarry instead. I disagree with both aims for a variety of reasons but I'm more interested in talking about the first one, why I don't agree with it and why the rework has done the opposite of what it aimed to achieve. I'll discuss a number of points:

I feel her poisons were perfectly clear: There are a variety of poison/DOT characters in the game and if anything I find Cass to be one of the most obvious (Singed aside, perhaps). Both her Q and W are very easy to see, with Q being a noticeable green explosion that makes a noise and W being a large purple cloud that stays visible for a total of 7 seconds and also has a cast sound. Compare it to Teemo's tiny basic attacks and you see a big difference. Not to mention, the big "poisoned" icon that goes above every poisoned champion is another large indicator that Cass is doing DOT damage. And to be honest, if you're facing a Cass and you're taking damage over time, you really should not be confused as to where it's coming from.

If her poisons weren't clear then one can assume that no poisons are clear, as this is surely a failure of the poison indicator to be obvious. This could be dealt with in a much cleaner way - actually making the poison indicator easier to see. Why not colour the health bar of a poisoned champion purple? That's pretty impossible not to see. To me it makes little sense to destroy one poison champ's poison damage because "poisons lack clarity" when a variety of other poison champs are allowed to use their poisons to their heart's content. It's inconsistent - you either destroy poison damage on every champ who uses it or do the sane option and rather than wreck something due to it being difficult to notice, make it easy to notice. If poison lacks clarity, that issue should be fixed. Making it so that Cassiopeia's poison damage is now so pathetic that you don't even need to pay attention to it is a really horrible solution. Like, I can't emphasise that enough. Your basic goal with the rework has been to make half of her kit so weak that players that don't notice it are no worse off than those that do :/ You should have just removed the poisons altogether if that was the aim.

I feel DOTs are clear: Switching from poisons lacking clarity to DOTs lacking clarity, most of my points are the same. Just replace people like Teemo with Malzahar. Either you completely destroy Malz's kit and put all his power on his Q or you leave Cass's DOT alone. Again, if DOTs are not easily visible, the correct option is to make them visible. Destroying a champion who uses DOT and leaving every other one who does alone is just... nonsensical. Either leave DOTs alone or remove them. Leaving them on a kit(s) but making them pathetically weak is an insult to players of the relevant champs.

DOTs obviously feel satisfying to players who use DOT champs: Yes, it's true that DOT mages are generally less popular than burst mages. Cass and Malz were never the leaders of the pack in pick rate when compared to people like Orianna or Syndra or any assassin. But that doesn't mean DOT is unsatisfying, that just means it caters to a more niche audience. Obviously, Stashu finds burst more fun, and maybe he's in the majority there, but that doesn't mean nobody likes DOT. It just means those who like DOT are in the minority and champions like Cassiopeia were perfect for that reason - they catered to the group of players who like DOT and have very few champions to satisfy them for that reason. At the end of the day, anyone who played old Cass liked DOT and sustained damage. If they didn't find her kit satisfying they wouldn't have played her, so why are you trying to make her more likeable to the people who currently play burst mages? Cass (who in her current form is "land a terrible DOT skillshot to enable a targeted nuke") will never appeal to them more than a real burst mage - why should anyone jump through so many boring hoops to get burst when you could play Orianna and do it so much easier? This rework feels like it's trying to appeal to a group of people who have infinitely more appealing options at their disposal. Stop trying to get the burst mage players on board, let Cass appeal to those she was meant to.

Moving on, I have one major and final point to discuss:

The rework has failed at improving Cass's clarity Pre-rework, you had one thing to look out for against Cassiopeia and that was quite simply "Am I poisoned?". As I said above, her poisons feel perfectly clear to me, so I don't think that was a struggle. As a Cass player, you also had one thing to look out for and that was "Is my enemy poisoned?". Again, not hard. This rework, on the other hand, has multiplied the things you need to pay attention to both as a Cass player and a Cass opponent exponentially. For one thing, her passive. Was simple and easy to pay attention to before. Wasn't even relevant to the opponent for the most part. Your opponent now needs to a) worry about what stack point you're at (which is very hard to see, just saying) and b) try to remember what you get from your current stack point. If Cass was changed to make her easier to understand for new players then this rework is a complete failure because you're not gonna have a clue what's happening with her without a wiki page to hand. "Is she at max stacks, has she got her CDR, has she got her spell vamp, will she hit a new threshold during this engage?" are all questions you have to worry about when facing a Cass and none of them are easy to answer. Compare to the old question: "Am I poisoned?".

4.21 has worsened the problem thanks to yet another addition to Twin Fang - the poison debuff. To figure out how much damage Cass's DOTs are going to do to you, you no longer have to just look for her Q/W hitting you or the poison indicator but have to keep a careful track of how many Twin Fangs have hit you in the last 5 seconds. Is it 0, 1, or 2+? Every one of those numbers will have a different consequence and the mathing you need to do to work out how much damage you're taking based on each of those scenarios is frankly ridiculous, particularly in a team fight. If people couldn't keep track of her poisons in a busy team fight before then how on earth can they be expected to keep track of her poisons, her stacks and the amount of Twin Fangs they've been hit with? Even the Cass player is gonna be confused at that point.

I just don't understand the rework. How can you create a rework based on stated goals and fail to reach them, then get even further away from those goals in your later fixes? You've removed her lane bully aspect and moved her damage to late game, sure, but your attempt to do that was ludicrously over-complicated and frankly manipulative. Her rework was presented as a way to unlock new power on her, when in reality it was a carefully crafted plan to make sure she had no damage output before 20 minutes. Your intent to remove her lane bullying was even craftier, right down to the scaling AP ratio on Twin Fang. You not only removed all the damage from her Q and W but made it so that to do any damage, you had literally no choice but to do E max, because it's the only one that hits a decent ratio but only if you level it up first. I'm glad you removed the scaling ratio because it was a horribly manipulative way to lock players into a playstyle. I don't actually think scaling ratios is a bad idea, it's a fairly neat way of making someone get more powerful as the game goes on and I'd much prefer you removed her passive and gated her power with scaling ratios. But it shouldn't just be Twin Fang getting a scaling ratio, it should be her poisons and her ult. Q going .45/55/65/75/85 would be cool and lead to you actually getting more powerful post level 9. R going .5/6/7 would similarly lead to you getting more powerful post 16. Instead the game is "build enough AP so that after 30 minutes you make up for horrendous ratios" and it's not fun, and it's not clever. It's a very lazy way to gate a champion's power.

_

I know this thread is exceedingly negative and I wish it wasn't because Stashu seems like a fairly cool guy, but above all what I hate about the rework is:

1. How I disagree with Riot's problems with her poison's "clarity" and how they've done nothing to fix those problems but instead made her poisons so pathetic that the problems don't matter because her enemies no longer need to pay attention to them.

2. How complicated she's been made. Her kit is a ball of restrictions and contradictions that is really irritating to keep track of. None of the messy stuff involved in Aspect of the Serpent, nor the 5 different abilities Twin Fang now holds were necessary when anything that needed done with Cass could have been done in a clean, neat fashion. Riot's idea to fix Cass's problems has been to destroy her poisons and make it so that if you do about 10 different things at once you get to use them again, when that was never necessary.

3. How frustrating the attempts to fix her have been. Ever since the rework it's been a constant struggle on here to get Riot to fix her poisons and all we get is utter refusal to do the simple thing and buff their damage. Instead we get "OK well how about if you hit 2 Twin Fangs in a row your poisons do more damage for a few seconds?" or "how about Miasma gets stronger the longer you stand in it?" and so on. When all we want is simplicity and her kit to actually be able to do stuff without jumping through hoops, it's incredibly disheartening for every solution proposed by Stashu to be "ok well how about we introduce another combo that if you do, you get a bit more damage?". I don't want to have to combo to do damage Stashu, I just want to use my poison. Why is that so much to ask? :/ I am not asking for Cass to be a faceroll champ but if Orianna just has to press Q and gets her damage, why do I have to go WEEQ (after I've got enough stacks and items for enough AP to make up for my horrible ratios)? Cass was never simple but it's never fun to play someone who is complicated for the sake of it and that's what Cass is right now.