To the balance team about Kalista.

NinjaKris··18 votes·1,883 views

Hi My name is Ninjakris, I'm a Season 5 gold ADC Main and a Kalista main. She's my favorite champ and I've played her since release. I've also watch her slowly decline from the best to the worst. Kalista is a very unique champion and here are some ways you could buff her to be effective in competitive and for the rest of the 99% that isn't pro play.

1.Revert the 90% ad scaling change made about a year ago. Kalista has always been and Should remain the lane dominant early game champ she is. With all the nerfs she's received I think giving her back the 100% auto scaling would be fair to her. This way she will still be prominent early like she should be, just she'll remain on par with the rest of the adc's late game but champions like Vayne, Sivir, Caitlyn, will still out scale her. Even in lane it feels like Kalista loses a lot of match ups she shouldn't lose but she does due to all the nerfs she's received.

2.Revert the change to her w where her oathsworn must be near her to have extra attack speed. I'm just gonna flat out say it. This change was really stupid. This was the nail in the coffin for making Kalista only good for the 1% of competitive players. I'm not trying to break Kalista I just want her to be good again and balanced for both the 1% of competitive and the 99% of everyone else. The change should be reverted back to the old w and how it should stay. Kalista can be somewhat team reliant, however this change made her far to team reliant and its only fair if she's viable for competitive and non competitive players alike.

  1. A Kalista's rend change idea- What if kalista's rend stacks couldn't stack endlessly but they had a cap, lets say 20? if she reaches this number she'll get bonus damage in her rend (including the whole Kill=cd reset and 2 kills= mana and cd refunded). This change would make up for changing her ad scaling back to 100% instead of 90%, If the rend stack cap was implemented then her damage would still be massive with a lot of spears (like it should be) but its not endless. This would also make it so junglers have a fair fight in baron and dragon sieges because smite only goes up to 1000 damage, but if a Kalista has like 25 spears then her rend will do about 2500 damage and will secure baron way before either jungler has a chance to smite. If this change was implemented then turned out not so good, then it can always be reverted and can try something else.

4.Make Kalista's passive hop a set speed. Kalista's hop in her passive has had a few changes over the years and i think it should just be a set speed the entire game. Not the speed of a summoner 4 but not the slowness of an summoner 3 either. This change would make it so enemies can get use to the speed of your jump and it adds counter play to the champion, which every champ should have. cough Fizz cough

I hope everyone who sees these changes keeps and open mind and maybe even helps out with other ideas on how to change Kalista. I don't want Kalista to become Yorick set aside and forgotten for 4 years. Thank you for reading and have a nice day. :)

46 Comments

Mr Broken Wings9 votes

Nobody except kalista players want her to be viable. Simple, her kit is aids against ALL melees and everytime she gets slightly viable she gets horribly overpowered in coordinated play. Delete her, not buff her, she has gigantic problems in her kit that will never be balancable ( her passive makes her either hit or miss and nothing inbetween). She needs a rework, she is even more toxic then yorick in her current state even though she is a new champion and the championdesigner failed horribly with making this champion, thats just the truth.

DJMason884 votes

Umm.. What? Her kit is not "Aids" against melee champions, she was meant to be a kiting ADC who;s good early to mid-game.

NinjaKris4 votes

Thank you for using common sense

Mr Broken Wings5 votes

{quoted}

Umm.. What? Her kit is not "Aids" against melee champions, she was meant to be a kiting ADC who;s good early to mid-game.

A dash every aa is NOT balancable on an ad carry, thats a horrible champdesign and needs either to be trash or deleted.

Arakadia2 votes

Its not a large ranged dash and that is her only good source of peel. A good Kal will use her E to kill them not just to kite them. Besides slows turn it down and CC'ing her will slaughter her.

DJMason881 votes

Pretty Much This ^

CLus4 votes

I totally agree. Leave her abomination of a kit in the dumpster right where it belongs please and thank you.

Arakadia3 votes

No champion should be dumpstered.

warpenguin5559 votes

Rework is needed

KONO RUBICK DA2 votes

her passive is the only thing that needs to be reworked. We already have hyper-mobile adc, we don't more.

TurquoiseYoshi7 votes

The problem with Kalista is that she is a mobile utility hyper-carry ADC who doesn't really pay for being great at all three. She has the indisputable best mobility in the game. She ends up as a hypercarry because of her speed hopping as well as being able to stack Rend incredibly well as the game goes on. And she has lots of utility in her ult, W, and infinite Rend stacking. And much of that is very solid and not really equaled by many, if any other ADCs in those individual departments (engage, vision, neutral objective control). All of this gives her incredible power at all points in the game. I know you said that you want Kalista to be balanced for all levels of play, but a champion who has been nerfed over and over and over since her release, while still being a very popular professional pick until recently, when her nerfs and itemization changes finally caught up to her, isn't going to be balanced with the removal of many of these nerfs. She falls in the category where she has so much raw power and utility in her kit that if she's decent in low elo, she's gonna be spammed in the pros. So Riot has to intentionally keep her weak, else she'll be too powerful in the pros. What she really needs is a rework on a lot of her utility, but that's likely not going to happen, considering that she's still pretty new.

Slamurai Jack5 votes

[{quoted}](name=RYL Ninjakris,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=53BEZIL0,comment-id=,timestamp=2016-07-08T23:57:38.582+0000)

1.Revert the 90% ad scaling change made about a year ago. Kalista has always been and Should remain the lane dominant early game champ she is.

No. Fuck that noise. A champion that's so oppressive when ahead should never have such a dominant early game. It's bad enough these jackasses Azir Fizz Leblanc Pantheon Quinn get away with it. But at least none of them have a dash on every single auto attack.

NinjaKris3 votes

I explained after that a way to balance it out if you read the entire post.

NinjaKris2 votes

Also Kalista sucks ass late game so if she has a good early game its fair because if she dosen't get ahead early then she is punished for it very hard.

Penns6 votes

You forgot Yasuo hehe xd

Slamurai Jack4 votes

Play Yasuo against anyone who isn't a skillshot reliant mage and you see just how weak his early game actually is. His lvl 1 and lvl 2 are competitive but his 3-9 is one of the weakest in the entire game and he also has one of the weakest first backs of all solo laners. Don't lose to Yasuo by lvl 3 and you've already won the lane as basically any champion.

Penns3 votes

Well it depends on matchups but Id say Yasuo with an early item 3086 isnt that bad.

Slamurai Jack2 votes

It's actually so bad that some Yasuos go Phage instead and rush Triforce first item just so they don't have to buy Zeal on their first back. Even 40% crit on the item isn't enough to convince a lot of Yasuos to buy it because crit without actual damage isn't really that meaningful.

Arakadia3 votes

That sounds biased.

LankPants3 votes

Awww, you think your cancer champ is balanced. That's cute. I'll spell this out for you, fuckboi has a 51.5% winrate top despite being a "high skillcap" champion. He's seriously overpowered right now, he needs some large nerfs to pull him back into line.

Slamurai Jack1 votes

His winrate curve is perfectly in line with what Riot considers a balanced champion: 54.5% at 125+ games is in line with what Riot considers an appropriate level of success for a champions most experienced players and that 54.5% is not even close to what the top tier champs are doing these days. When's the last time you saw Yasuo in pro play? I've seen it maybe twice this entire season.

LankPants1 votes

https://soundcloud.com/leaguecommunity/state-of-the-game-july-2016

Watch this from 48 minutes to about 50. The podcast explains this far better than I can in text. Assuming Yasuo is a high skill champion the idea of "players who aren't as good at him may pick him" is highly applicable.

Slamurai Jack1 votes

The average Yasuo player in Plat+ elo has 92 games on him. That's more than enough games to learn and play a champion at a competitive level in whatever elo you reside. Remember, we're not talking about League of Legends as a whole here. We're talking about high elo, or at least close to it. And at that level, people don't just pick champs they don't know how to play. And in a meta where all of the top adcs in solo q are immobile, it's no surprise that Yasuo is doing well.

LankPants1 votes

Averages can be deceiving. Yes his average games played are 92, but the majority of players have played less than 50 games of Yas. Almost a quarter of Yas players have played less than 15 games and a further quarter have played between 15 and 50 games.

The reason why this is a lot different than the 92 game figure of average games is because 92 is a mean figure, which includes outlier Yas players who have played 2500 games of Yas, this actually really skews that number. The Pie Graph showing the %of games played is modal data, which is far more useful as it actually shows how many games each Yas player has played.

And as for "players don't pick random shit they don't play", that's just BS. There are always idiots who are willing to lose a game, if there weren't people would have to ban new champs on their release so they don't have to deal with first time 'X' in their game.

CeexSett1 votes

Have you ever even played Yasuo recently? Playing him top is super hard because most champions stomp him. Look at some strong champions there:

Irelia As soon as Irelia gets Sheen it's over. And it keeps getting harder.

Darius Yeah keep dashing dude. I'll just auto you to death. BTW nice windwall.

Trundle Impossible to duel as soon as gets ult, and even earlier you have to use minions prefectly tos top him from Q'ing. Oh and nice windwall also.

Even the not-so-OP champions are hard lanes. Jax Chogath Gangplank Pantheon Tryndamere Olaf

LankPants1 votes

And yet he maintains a 51.5% winrate when the top meta is against him. How broken must a champ be to win that much when he has to play into counters every game?

Masala Chai1 votes

Well that's the point of early game champions right?

"A champion that's so oppressive when ahead should never have such a dominant early game."

I would much rather go vs an ahead pre 6.6 Kalista than an ahead Draven Caitlyn Elise Illaoi Irelia or other early game dominant champions.

Second, Kalista has some HORRIBLE base stats, low end base attack speed, horrible armor even for an ADC.

NinjaKris1 votes

Thats kinda what I mean when I say her early is good but if she falls behind shes severely punished.

Masala Chai1 votes

This is a response to Slamurai Jack, not you.

I think you hit every nail on the head though

NinjaKris1 votes

Oh well thank you.

Lmao Get Mooned4 votes

Very well written with an intelligent outlook.

Dengeden4 votes

The AS nerf needs to stay, Kalista can double rend you 1v1 (and 1v2 when fed) way too easily otherwise.

90% AD thing can get reverted by all means. It'll allow her to max Q again, that was fun. The rend cap is a great idea only it'd be nice for it to be relevant in lane and not exclusively a nerf to her objective control (20 stacks? Rly?)

Arakadia3 votes

Maybe remove her jumps but give her a lower Q cd and a good strong jump on her Q.

NinjaKris2 votes

I don't know why my 3. turned into a 1. but it wont let me change it so please excuse that.

blfUvZ8Ybu2 votes

They thinks their op champions.Like Sivir, Ashe, Jhin, Cait etc.They admitted.They are happy to see Sivir at competitive.

I said from the beginning.Kalista and Corki need buffs; Ashe, Jhin, Sivir, Cait need nerfs.

season is doomed2 votes

Yeah I've been picking up ADC and I tried out Kalista multiple times. Honestly she needs help and badly.

100T iLL2 votes

idc about anything you said, until kalista has that hop while auto and Q removed i don't want to hear anything.

Wolfram Oxford1 votes

In my opinion they should;

  • Revert the 0.9 AD auto attack
  • Make it so her hop has a constant speed and distance
  • Revert oathsworn attack speed changes and raise her base attack speed
  • Make Pierce apply on-hit effects and have a dynamic cool down (higher early, lower later; something around 5 seconds when maxed)
  • Remove the effect from movement speed slows on her auto attack
WoonStruck5 votes

You would make her indisputably the best ADC in the game again.

NinjaKris3 votes

The point is to balance her not make her broken again

Masala Chai2 votes

O-V-E-R-P-O-W-E-R-E-D

Gosh Darn1 votes

Kalista has more arbitrary requirements and 2v2 potential than any other champion in the game. It's a lot of power with a huge anchor. I think they should slightly decrease the peak power that she's capable of and remove all of her anchors. (90% AD, AS penalty without oathsworn). Maybe even change her ultimate because it makes no fucking sense and it's pretty clunky. You don't exactly want to throw a Soraka into a horde of enemies.

tl;dr she needs a rework and I'm surprised they didn't fix her issues with the ADC rework.

DJMason881 votes

2 v 2 potential... OF COURSE she has really good 2 v 2 potential, that's what her kit is designed off of, in a 1 v 1 or 2 v 1 situation she can be easily killed unless ahead. And her ult can be used to save allies, not just throw them into enemies. Also, that's why kalista is better with supports like Alistar,Leona and Nautilus, they are tanks that have engage on them.

NinjaKris1 votes

If you guys could please up vote this so the devs will see it and take a look at some of the ideas.

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