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The issues that remain from the Rek'Sai rework...

ZeeDrop·7/20/2018, 1:08:27 AM·12 votes·9,026 views

(Just here to clarify this is quite a long rant that goes in-depth on the reasons why one of my most played champion in the game could use another look at to ensure that they don't get thrown into the shadows till 5 years from now to get reworked again.)

I understand that as of patch 8.14, Rek'Sai has finally received her first buff in what seems like ages, however I would like to note that a slight upgrade in her scaling on her Q and R is not going to rid the issues that still persists from her recent rework which took place during patch 7.11, the main issues that I'm going to tackle is the horrendous nerf to her old passive and the risk/reward that comes from her new ultimate.

Starting with the rework itself I think Riot had good intentions to find a way to save the identity of Rek'Sai as a character while also giving her a better job than just a living breathing Malphite ultimate, yet the removal of her ability to knock up a whole team and her old ult that used to give her the idea of "What if we made Nocturne but as a tank" meant that the idea of her trading those purposes for more overall damage meant that she would have to be able to make up for serious utility and base damage that the old kit was able to utilize. The changes made to her Q and E heavily reinforced this idea and the ultimate change was the hook, line and sinker when it came to introducing this new playstyle of hers, the problem was that there already existed two champions who resembled her new rework, those two being the already mentioned Nocturne, who has been having a great time in the meta as of right now, and Vi, a champion who is either busted or straight up garbage depending on how fast she can obtain her Tri-force, and in no way am I saying these champions have kits so similar it is as simple as copy and paste, but they are good comparisons to the Rek'Sai rework introduced in 7.11.

Let's start off with Vi because she is a champion I have much more experience with, just from looking at their Q, W, and E, we can draw a good amount similarities between the two kits, both champions have a dash that can traverse walls, both champions have abilities that bypass armor in some form or way, and both champions have AOE enhanced auto attacks. Despite what it may sound like, I am not trying to state that two champions can't have similarities as such because I believe it is healthy to have these type of champions open to players for situational picks or in case one of them gets banned or picked away from the player, however once we get in to the passive and ultimates we start to see the issue, Rek'Sai's passive is mainly for healing throughout the jungle or recovering health after a skirmish, where as Vi's gives a shield for both combat and sustain, this wouldn't be so much of an issue if only Rek'Sai's passive wasn't absolute garbage nowadays as the healing was changed in 7.11 from 25-450 to a laughable 20-190, but you might be saying "Zee calm down that's a 5 health point difference at the start of the game, and after all isn't Rek'Sai's main strength her early game?", unfortunately it isn't that simple, to give you an idea at level 3 Rek'Sai used to get 75 health back from her passive but after the rework at level 3 you only recover back 40, so essentially her passive was cut from 25 health per level to 10 per level, and getting 150 health at level 6 is way different from getting a measly 70 especially when you account for the fact that Rek'Sai still needs to build health in order to be effective which makes the change hurt all the more and with grievous wounds becoming very prominent with ignite buffs and healing champions getting the spotlight such as Vladimir it really doesn't look all that good of a passive with how little healing you receive, oh and as for Vi, she gets a 10% max health shield that has a 12-8 sec cooldown from the get go. Oh and I haven't gotten to the best part of all this cause now we get to compare the ultimates of these two, and let me say if you don't want a Vi ulting onto you I can completely understand, theres is almost no way of stopping her, she can use it as soon as she's near you, and you can't even flash away from it! Meanwhile Rek'Sai's current ultimate starts off with a delay as she has to prepare her leap, and even before she can do that she has to damage the enemy so that she can actually ult, then when she does jump she gives out the biggest yell in the world just in case the delay didn't give you any time to prepare and the icing on the cake...you can flash away from it. I am dumbstruck that out of all the amazing ultimate abilities in the game, she has to have the worst one out of all of them, I mean it is a blatant point and click that can be flashed AWAY from, forget I mention how any blink in the game can dodge the ultimate. It makes zero sense why you would make only one point and click ability that is an ULTIMATE of course easily evadable by one of the most popular if not mandatory summoner spells in the game. Tell me the last time you have flashed away from a point and click ability and the flash itself saved you from its damage or effects.

Alright well now that we have passed that humongous mountain of text let's just briefly talk about Nocturne as well as a few other champions who have considerably better abilities than my favorite landshark in video game history (Sorry Garchomp ;( ). Ok so Nocturne as well as his buddies Warwick and Kayn all have a form of self healing (very important for junglers btw), AOE (Except for WW), hard cc (Rhasst gets a knock up), and have quite the set of mobility options. Meanwhile Nocturne gets to heal whilst auto attacking and has one of the best ultimates in the game thanks to global pressure (Can't flash away from it), Warwick gets both a heal on his Q and a passive heal if he gets as low as below 50% hp as well as a dodge-able ult that isn't point and click and deals more than enough to compensate, and Kayn who gets a 100-160 heal that scales with 40% of his AD and is also his main traversal ability, oh and his ultimate can't be flashed away from and remains untargetable for 2 more seconds than Rek'Sai's most reliable part of her ultimate being the delay. We can see that these champions get the better end of the stick when it comes to sustain and reliable ultimates, in general their kits are more reliable than Rek'Sai's no matter what stage of the game it happens to be.

So how can we address these issues and make it so as to fix what has been done to what essentially looks like a job half done. Well for starters reverting her passive to it's state before the rework could help, or we could replace her passive for something more fitting that could tie more into her tremor sense or tunnel abilities, for instance giving her extra movement speed or damage when coming out of a tunnel or increasing the speed at which her tremor sense displays enemy movement. You could try to change the passive to evoke more of the predator feel that the rework wanted to encourage, perhaps you could still implement her fury bar into it. As for the ultimate something has to be done, whether it be removing one or both of the restrictions that plague it (the screech and delay can stay) or you could revert for the previous ultimate that incentivezed careful placement of your tunnels in order to make quick plays across the map. I wouldn't be against a new ultimate either, one that possibly plays more around her whole "Monster underneath the ground" aspect that could possibly keep the untargetablity the current ultimate has and reinforcing it more. The issue with Rek'Sai isn't as much with her damage output with her Q or the true damage on her E but mostly on the two abilities that are so lackluster compared to other bruiser junglers who follow a similar playstyle. I hope that you take in to account that building a full AD Rek'Sai with her kit is too risky, as such health is a requirement in a lot of her builds so some form of a defensive steroid could be a definitive way of allowing the predator to feel less like they're prey.

                                                                  That's it for now, please comment below and share your thoughts on why this change should or shouldn't happen.

17 Comments

Tahminatrix 7/20/2018, 1:18:03 AM10 votes

Yea, the rework really messed with her identity as a diver, the attack speed on her R for her Q and the aoe knockup really lived up to it but I guess riot wanted to cut down on her mobility and map pressure and compensate her for a more solo carry/snowball assassin type kit which failed completely so now she doesn't see much solo queue or competitive play.

SweedishGunner7/20/2018, 2:28:48 AM9 votes

Rek'Sai suffers from wanting to be a fighter who builds a lot of AD but not actually being tanky enough to do it.

She has basically no innate sustain or resists, her passive is useless in combat and she gets blown up before even being able to use it.

If you look at a champion like WW you'll see he has inbuilt sustain and damage reduction, same with someone like Xin, Rek'Sai has nothing.

5050BS7/20/2018, 7:06:33 AM5 votes

Her AOE Knockup nerf was too harsh. Its not like other champs dont have it one demand

Aatrox Alistar Chogath JarvanIV Kayn Nami Ornn Trundle Velkoz Yasuo Ziggs

Yes some are better then others in how they preform but they all are a AOE Displacement that is on a lower then 15s CD (under 5s in some cases)

Nerfing her knockup was more then a team fight nerf. She use to be able to use it defensively and it was great. After the nerf she cant.

EmpressOfBeauty7/20/2018, 4:03:54 AM3 votes

I appreciate how nice you are in how you delivered what you had to say about it, and I agree with you. Rek'Sai drops very low in her early clear and her E damage feels very underwhelming.

I feel like a nice but probably broken idea for an ultimate would be for her to be able to become untargetable underground for a brief period of time (maybe 10 seconds) and then when she approaches an enemy, they get an indicator similar to Rengar's ultimate so they know she is near and can react to it if they hurry in time, but Rek'Sai can still point and click at them from her untargetable position and leap and do her damage. I feel like it adds to her character identidy alot more.

420 grams7/20/2018, 6:18:49 AM2 votes

Reduce ult cast time and make w vision radius same as smite range. Boom, easy.

Sire Hippington7/20/2018, 11:08:37 AM2 votes

It's just a typical thing for riot. People complained about old reksai beeing a mere knockup but and wanted to be able to built and play her more agressively, and riots reaktion simply is lowering utillity, increasing damage scaleings and that's it. On first look one might think that's a solid way to boost agressive builts, but in reallity it isn't. If you go for more agressive builts, you sacrifice tankiness to do so, so you can only go for that if you have either high base survivabillity or can get you're damage of quickly/savely, and this is where riot failed on her rework. They nerfed her survivabillity and thx to the lost AS on ult, she also needs longer to get her damage of, so going for agressive builts remains a very risky move that usually only works as long as you are ahead and struggles once it comes to teamfights.

I think the passive heal is fine early, she still has strong clears and about the best pathing and as a manaless champ, to much helath sustain would offer infinit uptime. However, i think it needs to scale much better into lategame, maybe through an ad scaleing or just much better basevalues at later levels. I think her ult is not that bad, the damage is quite high, the range is huge and the main point is that it allows you to focus in a fight. However, i think her W and ult boith could use some passive effect: Her W could use a small MS boost for when ever you surface(7-15% for 2sec, also procing on her ult) and her Ult should gain back some passive AS, atleast for her Qs. All that together would give much more sustain mid-late, allow her to get off her damage more quickly and also help her sticking to a target duering that aswell. A bit more scaleing def stats wouldn't hurt either i guess. All this would probably push her over the edge, so it probably would need to come with some raw damage nerfs.

mack91127/20/2018, 3:00:20 PM1 votes

I find reksai in a pretty healthy place with her play style rewarding smart and clever play through use of her tunnels. I don't really like your champion comparisons because reksai is a true blue early game champ with her strong base stats and poor scaling . The strength of a reksai comes from her ability to be one of the most mobile champions in the game in particular at a point in the game were most other champs are not ( early game ) . A reksai player will win there game through strong counter jungling while also consistently ganking meaning your pathing must be perfect. You must control the pace of the game as after the 30min mark your viability goes down.

I do not feel reksai needs any more damage buffs as she can obliterate any non tank Target but I would love more utility / interaction potential with her ult other than if enemy has flash they can avoid the damage , let us the reksai player decide what direction we leap at them or something.

Galaxy Destoryer7/20/2018, 2:57:21 AM1 votes

How do u have more experience when vi when u literally don’t even play her