Let's pretend Yuumi wasn't defined by her 0 interaction W

Say for example, she had something like Taric's ally marking instead.

Now it's important to note this is the only direct change being made, everything else just being functional changes so they can operate in the same way without additional buffs. I'm aware she would be terrible with this and am not proposing it as an _actual _change. Instead I aim to illustrate what she would be like without her W, so humor me as I explore a fictional alternate reality where Yuumi has her abilities function as nearly identically as they can without being able to latch to targets. I'll explain the point of it all at the end.

First, she would still have her passive which grants a permanent shield on hitting a champion. It isn't as strong as similar shields like or 's, but it has a lower base cooldown so that's probably fine. Overall her passive wouldn't lose much.

Her Q would need to be controlled differently, maybe holding the Q key directs it to the cursor? Or controllable while originating from her w-marked target as is the case now. Well it would still be incredibly weak even if she could manually control it while unattached. 60 damage at most is pitiful for early poke, and it is often 40 instead. Hell, gets 70 with a massively more powerful CC on a lower cooldown, faster projectile speed, and longer range (Admittedly only by a very small amount). Lux is a sort of hybrid enchanter and kill lane support, so for a more pure enchanter, compare with 80 damage and an insanely fast projectile coupled with E to make it potentially the longest poke in the game, and with a slow as strong as Yuumi's max rank Q at level 1, possible from frame 1 of the hitbox coming out.

Lulu too much of an outlier? Too "OP" to compare to? Okay, then how about who recently got nerfs to her Q to intentionally make it BAD for poke. It does the same as Yuumi's max Q damage with a much faster hit even at longer cast ranges, with a lower cooldown (which starts immediately as opposed to Yuumi's which only starts after the Q hits), and is AoE. The slow is comparable -- 40% vs 30%.

Now, Yuumi's Q does have something quite good compared to its contemporaries: scaling. It has a 60% AP scaling at its empowered range and more importantly scales up to 285 base damage at rank 5. The base damage in fact becomes higher than Q. The otherwise mediocre slow also scales ridiculously with rank, becoming an 80% slow for 1.75 seconds. Essentially the ability is a decent tool late game held back by being basically useless in lane. We'll explore this theme shortly.

W becomes, well basically W. She marks a target partner and they would share each others adaptive force as well as a mutual Passive shield (which would presumably tick away whether Yuumi or her partner were attacked). The most prominent thing here is Yuumi loses her untargetable mechanic which becomes huge in conjunction with the rest of her kit. Notably she also loses interactions like dashing to allies over walls or dashing OUT of targets over walls in the case of, for example, or to dash to Yuumi over the wall she dashed from.

E becomes in a lot of ways a weaker heal. Without being able to sit untargetable inside an ally she has a harder time storing charges and the recharge time is much slower than Nidalee's normal cooldown. By sitting on two charges and using one at the same interval as Nidalee's cooldown (every 12 seconds), it can be used 3 times with, effectively, that 12s cooldown, but then goes on an 18s cooldown for the remaining times. Not only does it end up with a drastically higher cooldown, it also has even less healing than what is otherwise the worst ally-targeted heal outside of a 1-charge . Hell, even would be a better healing support at that point.

R would only originate from Yuumi herself, and functionally I'm not sure it would be all that different than how its used in our reality, since unattaching or moving around yuumi manually is often the best way to land her R anyway.

So what do we have at the end here? The worst poke in the game, the worst heal in the game, a functional shield, a functional if unexciting late game burst in Q, and a functional ult. In other words, and I'm sure you're all aware, the only thing Yuumi has going for her IS her untargetable mechanic. Without being literally the most uninteractive champion in the game, Yuumi is outclassed in virtually every regard. And it isn't like where SOME champions do more damage and SOME champions do better shielding or healing. No, because at the same time, Karma herself does more damage and/or shielding than other champions. There is nothing Yuumi does better than any champion in the game and she relies entirely around the fact that she is a 0-interaction stat stick.

Yuumi will never be balanceable in her current state. There is no right amount of damage or shielding or healing or adaptive force she can offer. She will always and forever be either unusable because she doesn't have a real kit, or broken beyond belief because there is no way to interact with her.

I want to reiterate I do not believe she should have her latch mechanic removed because I do think it offers a unique mechanic buffing different champions and dashing around, and especially clever interactions like the aforementioned one with l . This is simply to illustrate that Yuumi, in her current state, is entirely defined by her latch mechanic and by not being able to effect her in any way.

There are myriad possible solutions ranging from a time limit she can remain attached to taking a portion of her latch target's damage, making her shield slowly drain away but have a lower cooldown so she has to come out and is encouraged to proc it more, only granting her adaptive force while the shield lasts and for a short few seconds after, having her abilities only castable for the first few seconds of an initial latch, and many more than these that I came up with off the top of my head just now.

The point is she will never be allowed to have a real kit with her W as it is in its current state.