Let's have a CALM, RATIONAL discussion about the Vayne buffs on PBE

For starters, we know her Q proccing W on two autos was a bug. However, she's lost her ability to crit on her Qs bonus damage, which is a big fucking deal. She's losing quite a bit of early/mid game damage on account of this because right now, Vayne currently goes into while maxing her Q (tumble).

Statistics back this up:

http://www.probuilds.net/champions/details/Vayne

https://na.op.gg/champion/vayne/statistics/adc

This is a huge nerf to her early/mid game because with ult + Q + shiv proc + crit with IE/Shiv basically one-shots squishies and the reality is, that was never supposed to be Vaynes design. She's a tank buster, she kills front liners. So this change with her W doing more damage in exchange for her Q losing crit on bonus damage is considerably fair in my estimation. Honestly, by itself I would actually suggest that this would be a nerf. But this wasn't the only change, we all know whats being proposed now:

Final Hour (R): New Effect: "While under the effects of Final Hours, Vayne is revitalized when enemy champions she has damaged recently are killed, healing for 20% of their maximum health

Vayne must have damaged an enemy champion withing 3 seconds to earn healing."

I'm torn. This is only an effect that occurs while her ult is active and typically vayne uses her ult to stealth around, kite champions out and stay alive and she will go back in to clean up well after Final Hour wears off. We also tend to associate Vayne with being a tank buster, which she is, but we typically never actually see her become incredibly popular during tank metas (at least not more popular than she already is) and there's a reason for that.

Despite her ability to melt tanks and being arguably the best scaling ADC (honestly it's a toss up between her and Kog imo), she has to get dangerously close to champions because she has no way to extend her range beyond 550. Tanks can close that gap pretty easily and because of vaynes short range, she is generally easier to pin down - the only exception is when she times her ult properly and uses her team correctly to play around her but that's incredibly difficult both for vayne and her teammates. She's often far more difficult to protect and as a result, she tends to be less reliable. That's why she's almost never broken in heavy teamfight metas, but she is when bruisers/assassins are meta because her self peel is far valuable against less CC heavy team.

This isn't suggesting that Vayne is weak late game: she's not, because she has the 2nd highest winrate of any ADC past 40 minutes. Vayne is an amazing late game carry both by metrics of statistics and any anecdotal analysis I can provide. However, her role and current play pattern is unhealthy as fuck. The crit Vayne nuking squishies isn't her job and the fact that this is how she itemizes represents a problem: despite her expensive tastes, I.E/Shiv rush is more valuable than what should be her bread and butter BoTRK because Q max nuke just seems to be more reliable. That's a problem, regardless of her level of power because that isn't consistent with her design philosophy.

I can see Riot's line of thinking here. Let's make Vayne less about lane and skirmish dominance and more about the teamfighting risky tank buster she's supposed to be. And honestly, I don't think this change is actually going to benefit her much. She's losing quite a bit of lane power now and Shiv rush will be dead on account of that. And since she will be forced to max W, her power against squishy targets is going to go down significantly. This means her late game HAS to be even stronger in compensation for what amounts to a significant nerf to her early/mid game.

I'm in favor of getting rid of the crit nuke Vayne, that shit is dumb. And as I've stated, that's obviously not her design goal. I don't even think this really nets as a buff overall because if Vayne is in a position to participate in a kill within 3 seconds of not dying, chances are she was winning that fight anyway. This makes her snowball harder when ahead and win harder when it goes to late game and it doesn't actually address her issues . I wouldn't be surprised if as a result of these changes, she ends up actually being much worse and this mechanic gets buffed to ridiculous levels in compensation and she ends up being game breaking.

I don't pretend to know what to do with Vayne - maybe the current style is simply better to let be until a better, healthier alternative is found. I simply think this isn't the answer because it just makes Vayne win harder but doesn't give her consistency when behind or even.