Kindred was hit really hard by the preseason changes.
First let's start with the Keystones. With the nerf to fervor, there really isn't a keystone that feels good on Kindred. Nothing really suits her play style, with some people even opting to completely skip getting a keystone in general. Keystones:
**Thunderlords Decree ** - Riot Phreak's recommended keystone on Kindred. Issue is it falls off hard and essentially becomes pretty useless. Kindred builds more attack speed than anything else so it's not a mastery that scales very well.
Deathfire Touch - You can get a quick nap in before you kill anybody.
Fervor Of Battle (nerfed) - Takes wayyy to long to stack to get the damage off now. Extremely underwhelming.
Stormraiders Surge - Definitely one of the current favorites as a replacement for fervor. Allows you to kite or chase when triggered but still doesn't give nearly the value of fervor for Kindred or the feel.
Lethality: Kindred LOVES armor pen and with the changes to lethality, the runes and items have become more of a late game investment. Lethality runes were used for early game pressure, now there's no point when you can simply take attack speed. Attack Speed feels better earlier and scales well later. Items that have Lethality items like Ghostblade are still strong on her but the damage decrease is definitely noticeable across the board.
Jungle: With longer camp respawn times, Kindred has less time to get her marks. To make it even more difficult Scryers Bloom helps you track her significantly easier. The downside of not having Raptor camps to smite also hurts invading in the enemy jungle. Speaking of new raptors, new raptors WILL MESS YOU UP BIG TIME and it's one of her starting marks (scuttle or raptors). It's a pretty high risk to take them but at least you only need the big one.
Assassins With all of the changes listed above Kindred has very few tools to deal with assassins. She took a huge hit to her damage and getting her marks successfully. You could easily ult during their burst and have sufficient damage at the end to kill them. Now you barely do enough damage mid game and heavily rely on snowballing really really hard. Kindred was fun because you felt like death early game and had extremely strong solo domination pressure. Over her nerfs and all of the changes over time she feels like she is losing this identity and becoming more thirsty based on all these variables lining up perfectly. These variables are even harder to achieve based on the Junglers you face. Lately the jungle roster seems to favor champs that can flat out kill Kindred early on, Reksai, Lee, Elise, Nidalee, Kha, Shaco, etc
All in all it would be nice to see a little love for Kindred in either the dueling part of her kit or her ability to obtain marks, either in the camp or champion killing aspect.
