3,000+ game Kha'Zix mid lane main, here. Kha'Zix feels like he has lost his identity.

Before I get in to this I just want to say that this is entirely my opinion. I'm not trying to make the case for anything being more or less balanced than anything else. This is just something I've wanted to talk about and now that we're 4-5 months in to the assassin rework, I think it's fair to get in to it. Let me add that I'm not claiming to be the best Kha'Zix in the world, NA, or anything else. Not even close. I've played up to a low-mid diamond level in duo queue at my best and I once had a decently rated guide during the earlier seasons of the game. That's it. Regardless, seeing as there was a point where over 1% of my life had been spent in game as this champion, I have some grounds to forge this opinion.

Now that all that nonsense is out of the way, let's get to it. To me, Kha'Zix has always been about taking an enormous risk and it either paying off or blowing up in your face. That's what isolation was. Your timing had to be perfect and you needed to be able to predict the movements of your enemies. Kha'Zix was about capitalizing on enemy mistakes more so than anything. Was it frustrating for his squishier opponents? Absolutely. However, Kha'Zix is thematically an assassin, not a bruiser. That's why the reworked Taste Their Fear, for me, comes close to ruining the champion entirely. It seems as if his rebalancers seem to favour the idea of using a Void Assault with less counterplay in conjunction with a more reliable but lower potential Taste Their Fear. If you think that's fair and balanced, fine, but it isn't Kha'Zix.

Kha'Zix's identity was best conveyed during late Season 5 and the end of Season 6. Speaking of course about after the Nightblu3 hype, after the flat health reduction abuse, and after the Void Spike jungle utility spam (this right here was thematically the worst Kha'Zix has ever been, without question, but he could still be played in that high risk/reward way). Unlike many of the previous nerfs and changes, the assassin rework entirely destroyed a play style that was not an active issue at the time. The extreme difference between evolved, isolated Taste Their Fear damage and non isolated Taste Their Fear difference made the champion. It was part of his identity. With a combination of heavy penetration (I ran a +19 flat pen page) and moderately high AD, an end game isolated Tate Their Fear could reach over 1,400 damage on squishy targets. In combination with a single empowered auto-attack (and later Thunderlord's Decree), this was a death sentence for almost any ADC that made the mistake of being isolated. Kill window? About two seconds maximum.

Imagine that. An assassin deleted an ADC for making a mistake during the late game. Nowadays, the larger kill window (resulting from much lower isolated damage requiring Void Assault to wait out the reduced cooldown and at least one additional empowered auto-attack) means that squishy targets that make mistakes have a much longer window for them (and their allies) to correct it. Void Assault often ends up being a tool used to wait out endlessly stacked shields and reposition for a final, killing assassination, rather than being used to engage, escape, or switch targets amid the chaos. There is also the fact that Void Spike, which could once be used to help guarantee isolation for a slightly longer amount of time, must now be evolved to do so. Again, his live assassination style works. It's just a nigh total abandonment from the "all or nothing" isolation dependency. Historically, a non isolated Kha'Zix Q, even built for raw damage, would net you around 400 damage maximum late game. His empowered auto scaled less, meaning he needed that isolation. Now Kha'Zix just sort of kills squishy targets without isolation, just slowly. It just doesn't feel right.

Let's talk aesthetics specifically. Mantises are fragile, but deadly. Extremely patient, they wait for the perfect opportunity and make short work of their prey. This usually comes down to their prey making a fatal error. Mantises don't run around trading blows, and something tells me they wouldn't build off-tank. Remember Cell's first form in Dragon Ball Z? He preyed on the weak. When someone strong showed up that he had nothing to gain through fighting, he didn't get in to a slug match, he ran away. However, he would absolutely tackle a strong, risky target when it would benefit him and he had a perfect opportunity to make quick work of them.

That extremely risky play style that sometimes, or even often, comes back to bite you just makes the successes feel that much more amazing. Capitalizing on enemy mistakes as opposed to constantly setting up for own openings was interesting and unique. Years ago, there was a comment made by a Rioter (I forgot the name and I have since failed to track it down) that went something along the lines of "Kha'Zix gets changed a lot. His theme is one of constant change. If you don't like that, there are 105 other champions in the game for you to try."

To me, that isn't a legitimate excuse for constant changes that shake the very foundation of a champion to the degree that it changes their role from assassin to off tank to full tank to disgusting utility spam jungler (<<< I really hated this one lol). It just sounds like a scapegoat for bandaid fixes and various failed balancing efforts. Whenever one ability gets nerfed for being too strong, he gets another buffed for compensation, which immediately becomes broken and the cycle continues. It has happened with Q, W and R. Each time it has also changed the entire play style of the champion. Yeah, the new Taste Their Fear is a great jungle clear tool. Wonderful. Kha'Zix has always been able to clear the jungle, should new jungle have proved too difficult, could have been changed in much less drastic ways. I don't know about you, but I'd rather see a be difficult to play but good in the right hands than easily accessible and easily effective.

In an ideal world, I would have loved to see Kha'Zix's old Q carry over through the rework and be nerfed accordingly if lethality made it too strong later in to the game, as opposed to making it a tool for extended duels which the champion should never have.

So what do you think? Agree, disagree? What do you think defines Kha'Zix's identity? Let's hear it.