A Shen Main Discusses His Thoughts on the new Shen Rework (Reading Required)

I am Melledoneus, a Silver 5 player on the NA server. I mostly play top lane, particularly in the tank role. My main champion in this role is Shen, the Eye of Twilight. In case you were not aware, Shen recently got a rework. I played it. Now let's get to the point to keep this short(ish?) and sweet. (I mainly play Shen top, and occasionally jungle, so keep this in mind.)

The new rework turned Shen into a completely melee champion reliant on a narrow dash to deal damage. While his damage against bulkier enemies has increased, his weaknesses are much more defined. A little too defined. See, Shen now has to deal with champions with constant poke with very little sustain to begin with on a regular basis. But it was something.

The new Q does not make up for the sustain that Shen lost. Neither does the rest of his kit. But that's okay.

I know, I know. "That's stupid, Shen's heal was crucial to his laning phase!" I agree. And I was infuriated when I first saw that. But then, I realized... they buffed his regen. A lot. And if he is not surviving in lane like he used to, Riot can always buff his regen. His regen is pretty good right now, somewhere around Renekton-Mundo levels of natural health regen. As much as this will help him survive in lane, it will become more difficult to deal with his more unfavorable matchups such as or where his sustain was outmatched to begin with. Not to mention that lanes like and will be a lot less fun because mitigating poke is not something emphasized in Shen's kit anymore.

Shen's new W lacks proper mitigation. Shen needs to spend precious cooldowns to mitigate any damage now, and that's not fair.

People will argue something along the lines of "but Shen's shield is meant to be used in combat only!" I'd both agree and disagree with that notion. While Shen does indeed use his W in combat to mitigate damage, it also was a tool to expend during the laning phase to make poke lanes oh so much less painful than they usually are. That being said, I'd take this new W over the old one any day. The old one was nearly a waste of energy, not even hitting 300 HP on a tank's shield even when fully upgraded. This new W lets him negate autos completely, which is something I would love to have against laners like and . It makes for something much more influential late game, as it provides your carries with a way to deal with auto-based burst like and . My only other gripe is that it has such a short duration and most of the time doesn't feel as impactful as it should.

Shen's E has not been changed at all.

Usually, I'd be glad to see this. However, seeing an 11 second cooldown slapped on to it along with the removal of any range whatsoever on Shen kind of bothers me now. The ability is the same old, good taunt that we all know and love. However, personally I'd like to see one of three things:

1. An increase of range. Shen's E is now incredibly crucial to his kit. Without it, he can't get to his target. A range increase, even if just a slight one, will give his dash the massive impactful feeling to match how impactful it really is.
2. An increase in width. This will make it easier for Shen to land multi-man taunts without having to line up enemies like it's a public execution.
3. Decrease the cooldown, or give it a way to decrease it. An example would be that depending on how many enemies Shen lands his taunt on, his E cooldown is reduced by X seconds. Could use some tinkering.

Shen's damage has shifted from being more impactful to squishies to being stronger against brutes.

Shen's passive, Ki strike, used to be good against squishier champions. I loved this. It gave me the pressure I needed to zone the enemy ADC or mage away from the fight, possibly even finish them off if the assassin failed. Now that it's shifted to % max HP damage, it seems that Shen was built to combat the front line rather than dive the back line. A word of advice to Riot would be to give Shen some way to deal meaningful base damage with his Q, perhaps something scaling off of HP. Or just make viable again so I don't have to build every game to deal damage to champions.

That's my input for now. If you have any questions, comments, lawsuits, challenging statements, etc. just post here. And try to be polite, we're all playing this game for fun, not to verbally rip each other to shreds.