Kayn: Quality of Life Suggestions + Suggested Passive Addition
To start with, reflecting on his transformations:
I've played a bit of Kayn now, he's an extremely fun champ, that can be built a number of ways. His mobility, high damage, along with a high skill ceiling makes him interesting and challenging to play.
However, what is not so fun is the 4 minute wait between forms. I get the idea, it's supposed to provide an incentive to pick a lane to gank to gain the form you want; on paper this sounds good. In actuality though, the first 10 minutes of the match mean absolutely nothing in terms of gaining the necessary power to transform, I've gone 3/0 before 6 minutes and was just over a quarter of the way. Getting a single kill/assist after 10 minutes instantly unlocks the transformation, based on the champion(s) who were beaten. However, considering how large the point gain is, unless you were doing extremely well in progress on ganking melee champs, and were very far into the progress, a single kill/assist will override that. You will gain the form for whatever you killed.
Example, I spent the first 5 minutes of the game alternating between ganking Jax and Zed, both melee champs. I had about a quarter to a third progress from this. After that however they started to play safe, it wasn't until 10-12 minutes in that I was able to do something valuable as all of our lanes were pushed (with healthy laners); I managed to catch out and 100 to 0 the enemy fiddlesticks. Normally this would be cause for celebration, but honestly, I reacted with exasperation. I was ahead in cs, and had counter ganked (without kills), so I was farther ahead of him than he was of me, but Kayn is entirely reliant on his transformations for power. Without them, he is extremely weak, ridiculously so by comparison, which is fine with me. However, the fact that for killing Fiddlesticks I was punished, and had to go wait 4 minutes to get my transformation is kinda annoying.
My suggestion is simple, add a 30 second cd reduction per champion takedown on the other transformation. So if I were to continue ganking, say botlane, and managed to score a double for our team, then I would get 1 minute off the transformation time needed to become the Darkkin.
I think this should be retroactive, so if I'm already ahead, say 1/0/3, it would count that as '4 takedowns', and score it appropriately, reducing the transformation timer by 2 minutes.
And then onto the suggested passive-addition
This would be a rather small change, but I don't think it would be unreasonable. Add onto Kayn's passive 'Feed the Darkin Blade', every minion kill or (non-large) monster grants 0.1 AD, every large monster grants 0.5 AD, and every kill or epic monster grants 1 AD.
The main reason for this would be to make it feel like he is continually increasing in power over time. It's not as ridiculous as say Nasus' Q stacking, and in balance terms I can't say for sure if it would make him overbearing. It would allow him to do something while he is weakest (base form), namely farming safely and ensuring that he continues to become stronger.
Thematically it would reflect his blade stealing the life-essence of it's victims, and becoming stronger. His winrate isn't awful, and he's reasonably powerful, but at times it just feels like he doesn't scale as well as he could. Take Darius for example, with a similar amount of kills, and the same build, Darius will be significantly stronger. His self-healing in redform is great, and assassin has great damage as well, but I feel like a minimal increase in AD would be of great benefit.
300 Minions would be a 30 AD increase, that may sound like a lot but by that point you should have 300 or so AD anyways (as tank Kayn). Rather than requesting a scaling AD change, or a base one, this is a bit more interesting and thematic. It encourages you to farm a bit more than regular Junglers will, forcing you to again prioritize your ganks and roaming to determine what is the most valuable decision.
I could be completely wrong here, and missing something crucial to the balancing of the champ, so feedback is appreciated.
