Updated Kalista Rework and or Changes

Hey everyone, Thanks for the feedback, casual flame and criticism. Together we can make Kalista healthy for league of legends. Previously i posted some changes and now riots live design team has commented with more information on their desired changes to Kalista.

Lets summarize the current standing, ill address some of my concerns, perhaps dismiss some others and keep the dialogue going. I want to see your thoughts on this from the perspective of a non kalista player. (Because i am biased)

First, lets address one of the major elephants in the room, rend secures neutral objectives. I honestly do not believe that this has anything to do with her priority in professional play. It is a niche bonus to her kit but it does not make or break it in any way. She is picked because of her laning phase, kalista is extremely obnoxious to play against at 1 item - 2 item. she isnt picked because of her scaling, securing objectives is nice but i think its absurd to entertain the idea that she is op simply because she can rend Baron. We have never entertained the idea that we should nerf khazix q against monters, nunu q against monsters, those actually have less counterplay than rend does, because nunu could flash into the pit and q smite, similarly with lee sin khazix etc. If kalista is pushed off the baron at all during the entire duration her team is taking it rend will likely not be greater than a 1000 hp smite.

Currently the attack range nerf has been adjusted to 525 from the original 550. This change may be ok, sivir and xayah are both 525 range and have been successful in the game at many times.

W sentinel will no longer give charges and the Cool down has been increased from 30 at all ranks to 90/80/70/60/50 I don't see why this change will actually matter that much, the sentinels can be worked around rather easily and although they can have a significant impact on the game by giving you knowledge on the map, in its current iteration it is not nearly as strong as Hawkshot the laps that the sentinel does is unique and is not seen in another champion at all but it still does not last very long. Perhaps this nerf will help some of the pro play issues we are seeing.

People have been debating changing martial poise from .9 to 1.0. This change isnt needed and has been addressed by Riot, thats all we will mention here.

The other matial poise change i think we should consider is the effect of having martial poises leap slowed by attack speed slows. This added effect makes items with have a double penalty for kalista. This really harms her late game ability and destroys her in solo queue. I hope you all never have to know the pain of playing against nunu with all the attack speed reductions make you want to just stop playing the game all together. Move speed reductions slow your attack speed, attack speed reductions slow your move speed and attack speed. Makes the champion very hard to play later.

Lets take a look at some of the other concerns that riot has, in the pbe notes one of the primary concerns is Kalista's ability to make Melee champions feel irrelevant in the late game. I think Nerfing kalista is the first step in riot trying to make the bot lane meta diverse, since playing bruisers bot is most punishable by kalista in comparison to other Marksman. Although im not quite sure how Tristana's 683 attack range (833 with rfc) makes melee champions seem viable. (Rocket jump btw) I cant imagine why we are trying to force this change to bring mages and other champion styles into the bot lane as it usually just creates other unforeseen problems. We have 17 marksman and we only ever play 5 of them.

I think the proposed changes by riot leave much to be desired and will not harm kalista's strengths or weaknesses enough to make her a more wholesome champion that either thrives or fails. Currently she is held at priority in pro play but she isnt destroying in it by any standard. Its quite hard to argue that she is op as a champion since so much is sacrificed by picking her, she just has a very well rounded kit that works well in pro play. If we wanted to see generally less kalista we would buff the other lane bully type champions since she is currently the only one viable. Typical lane bullies that used to exist in the game in bot lane would be Since the old glory days of these champions they have been nerfed into the ground and replaced by only hyper scaling champions that are able to build Kalista is the only champion left that is able to punish these champions in the early game. I think bot lane in pro play would see much more diversity if we made some changes to lucian, currently if they arent kalista and strong level 1, or Tristana and just overpowered to shit. they cant be picked.

Overall i think the changes needed to put Kalista into check come from other champions simply being better than they are now, we already see a huge drop in her win rate on this patch to around 46%. Usually she floats slightly below 50 which is to be expected but this low of a win rate is almost unheard of, it does concern me that we are still so adamant on nerfing her when her solo queue viability is slim to none unless you put in 100 hours on her, which if you do, it should be viable for you. To restate, this is a champion that in an average players hands takes more damage than she deals, (ad carry btw) but since it is strong in the hands of a really good player we are still looking to nerf. We dont talk about nerfing other champions simply because people that are good at them do well.