What's Wrong With Shaco

Shaco isn't in a good spot as a champion and here's my take on him:

As a champion, right now shaco sucks overall. His kit provides outplay potential and that is keeping him in not the worst spot, but from a combat standpoint, there is no reason to play him over any other assassin. His base stats and scaling are decent at best, his only real combat damage comes from auto attacks with no way to actually make his aa stronger in his kit like most other assassins have. His E after the recent change is in a MUCH better spot, but ultimately he isn't as good as any other real assassin in league right now. Unless he is super fed with insane level and item advantages, he simply can never come near the dream of deleting someone like an assassin wants to be doing. When he was reworked, I was told by the Rioter that they didn't want assassins really "one shotting" but then the new rengar was one shotting more consistently than ever. Lots of assassins can one shot: rengar, fizz, zed, kha'zix, talon, etc. etc.. Shaco never reaches really anywhere near that since the ONLY way he has to quickly deal damage is aa e aa. No empowerment for an auto, no bonus damage (except his passive but i'll get to that in a second). And even if he does get onto a target squishy enough to one shot, his only escape his ulting and hoping you can trick them into killing the clone while you escape, which will almost never happen if theres multiple people there. It's bad enough that building him assassin isn't nearly as good as building him off-tank, which is just sad for any supposedly "assassin" champion. As for his passive, at most it adds 30% damage to 1 auto attack in a fight, and that's assuming you have no crit in your build. If you want to build crit (which is the best way to actually come close to one shotting), then the 200% from crit just over-writes the passive, making the passive literally have done nothing. In fact, if you have infinity edge, backstab crits will do LESS damage than normal crits, but that's just a weird interaction with infinity edge's bonus crit damage. If you don't go crit, the only other way to make your auto's pack more punch (besides raw ad) is lethality, and a full lethality build does less damage in burst AND in overall dps than a crit build does. With his old q, attacking out of stealth would guarantee a crit that from level 1 had a higher % than the current passive's crit does period. AND, the ability scaled the crit damage up with rank, giving him a meaningful way to add damage to his autos, while the new passive (since they moved the crit from his q to his passive) literally stays at 130% normal damage from level 1 to level 18. It never even reaches anywhere near a normal crit's damage level. Combine that with the fact that Shaco has no way to do more damage beyond 1 ability that needs them to be low for it to do good damage and you are left with only your ability to outplay your opponent through cheesy q and r usage. By mid-game if you aren't extremely ahead you can't fight most any other jungler currently. Also, if you want to do any decent damage, you need points in your e, but in order to give yourself the outplay potential you need to stay relevant, you need at least 3 points in your q, which means until level 7 you have a rank 1 e. Your entire early game, which is the only part that is still decently strong, STILL has to mostly revolve around cheesy q mechanics. You need points in e to take advantage of any form of damage shaco has, but you also need the points in your q to either outplay or stay alive, which means you just do sub-par damage but stay alive or do good damage and have less outplay potential. And I could rant for hours about how shitty his passive truly is as an overall ability, but i'll try to keep this short. Imagine you're playing fiora, but you can't dash, and every one of your passives is on the enemies other side. Now imagine the only time the passive is on the side closest to you is if you're already winning and don't need the damage anyways. Since league has instant turning, enemy champions are ALWAYS facing towards you when they are right clicking you. They could literally right click you and never take a backstab unless you use q, which has a super long cooldown, and wasting your q means you have no outplay potential. Boxes do SOME damage in a fight, but it is only really noticeable very early game or if you're playing AP shaco.

As for AP shaco, he's in a pretty GOOD spot, but I hate that he's in a good spot. Shaco is not an AP champion. He should not be an AP champion. The AP shaco playstyle is toxic for the overall game. If you play it in a lane, you sit there struggling to get farm and hope the enemy is dumb enough to step into your boxes, in which case they just straight up die. No counterplay once they've stepped into your little minefield, just dead. If they are smart enough to never go near your boxes, or buy a red trinket and use it any time they go in, they inevitably outfarm, outscale, and your team is left with a near useless 5th man. If you play it in the jungle, you struggle to farm camps so you try to gank, where you have a good surprise factor, but little damage unless you snowball hard. If you gank well and get lots of kills you get to 1 shot people and hopefully carry the game, while falling behind means you're also near useless. Either way it is a VERY polarizing "you have to win HARD early or you lose HARD" playstyle which is not good for overall game health. I'm just glad there's only 1 high elo player for the bronzies to try to copy that plays AP shaco.

To reiterate, Shaco's kit right now is almost completely revolved around cheesy outplay since there is no way to empower auto's and only 1 major damaging ability. All other assassins do his job better while being safer picks that are almost all better at farming and make up for the less surpising, cheesy ganks with either more damage or more utility, or both. The only thing I can think of doing for him beyond another rework is removing the crit from his passive and turning it into flat bonus damage on top of his auto attack. At least then he can have some real burst that every assassin should have. At the VERY least, riot needs to make the passive crit scale up to 220% damage instead of staying at 130% damage all game.