[In depth analysis] Why Riot shouldn't have removed Kindred's W heal

Hello, I want to share my thoughts on Riots harsh balancing process that took place about one year ago and killed Kindred in hands of inexperienced players. First of all, I want to show you list of few jungle champions that have healing or/and damage mitigation in their kits:

• Lee Sin - gains bonus life steal and bonus spell vamp from W.
• Nunu - eats monsters and heals himself with Q.
• Shyvana - naturally tanky with lots of base armor and bonus resists from her passive.
• Jarvan IV - shields himself.
• Warwick - heals himself with Q and even more thanks to his passive when he's below 50% health.
• Fiddlesticks - sucks things and gets healed in the process.
• Kha'Zix - heals himself with W when in area of explosion.
• Nidalee - E=heal.
• Nocturne - spell shield.
• Gragas - passive heals him cuz he likes to drink.
• Vi - shield from time to time.
• Elise - heals from AA's when in spider form.
• Rengar - W heals him.
• Master Yi - W heals him and grants him damage reduction when active.
• Hecarim - W heals him when taking damage.
• Kayn - heals himself when entering a wall with E.
• Olaf - gains bonus lifesteal with W.

There are few more, but well... You see the pattern already. Junglers should have some kind of sustain or damage mitigation in order to have healthier clear and be better at dueling people.

Now, let's get back to what happened to Kindred in 6.13 when Riot decided to remove both their W heal and 7 base armor. In the patch notes we could read:

No stranger to the patch notes, Kindred’s back for another round of changes to address their unparalleled jungle dominance. Before we talk about the changes themselves, let’s get into a little bit of history.

While ranged junglers aren’t unheard of these days, setting out to develop a marksman jungler was no easy task. After lots of internal failures in testing, we felt it was necessary to give Kindred higher-than-average base stats and sustain (relative to marksmen) to even be able to clear their jungle. We accepted those extreme stats as necessary evils for Lamb and Wolf to be considered functional.

Fast forward to today, and we’ve clearly learned some lessons. While Kindred does possess a steep learning curve, part of that mastery is in learning how to kite the jungle monsters - meaning good Kindred players take little to no damage during their clear. That’s totally fine, but it means those ‘necessary evils’ aren’t so necessary after all. Kindred are marksmen, so they should be killable when caught out of position. Instead, Lamb and Wolf just walk around at full life and outduel just about everyone.

So that’s the deal. The changes below are all about emphasizing that weakness in Kindred while still retaining their ability to clear the jungle. The Eternal Hunters have been tough to balance before now, but we’re confident that by softening their dueling strength, we can work towards a more balanced Kindred long-term (one that isn’t nerfed in every patch consecutively, that is).

To be honest I get it, I really do know what they wanted to tell us. Kindred took almost no damage in the jungle so they were able to do whatever they want at full hp while not being punished to heavily after being exposed to damage. It's not fair for a ranged champion to be as tanky as melees while being pretty mobile (particularly with maxed Q at lvl 9). Thus, it was fair to take away a chunk of Kindred's armor. It made them squishier and allowed people to kill them when Lamb and Wolf was out of position. That's the price of being ranged, you either kite and take little to no damage, or you stand still and die.

So we already got Kindred's vulnerability to burst (without R of course). Also, less armor means that they will take more damage from monsters, hence that new effect on W to slow jungle creeps' AS and MS in order to make it relatively healthy. However, it only helps with jungle clear. Heal worked on every target, so Lamb and Wolf were able proc it during fights. And as we all know, almost every jungle champion has something like that in their kit.

One thing worth mentioning is the fact that it was pretty much nerfed due to the gap between experienced and inexperienced Kindred players. The first group was able to Kite and take almost no damage in the jungle, when the second one took some damage but was able to recover from it. After the nerfs, first was still able do do well in the right circumstances. However, both groups got hit pretty hard when it comes to fighting people in 1v1 due to the lack of sustain.

For me it'd be logical to do things step by step. Reduce armor first, see where it puts the champion. If that doesn't help look at their W heal. But NOT DELETE IT. It't the worst thing that you can do with a champion. Give them a nice, satisfying mechanic and then, just take it away without even trying to balance it. There were so much that could've been done with this:

• Restrict procing it only to champions.
• Increase number of stacks needed for the heal to occur.
• Reduce the healing itself.
• Change they way it stacks from moving and attacking to attacking only.

But no, let's just delete a part of champion's kit. It's like a doctor saying it's better to kill you because he doesn't want to figure out what's your problem. It felt so good to have that even if the healing was reduced by 50% it's still be an awesome part of Kindred's kit.

I've read every single line of patch notes when Kindred were getting nerfed. I've read all the reddit posts from rioters who were justifying their decisions on nerfing the Death and still, I have no idea why they gave up on balancing them and just straight up deleted the entire passive. That's just not the way it should work.