Idea for Slight Kindred Rework (Brining her back to viable)
Intro: In my opinion,
is in a very weak state right now in the current meta. I can understand why it has lead to this, seeing as on her release she was OP and the following year she was still destroying Solo Q if you just put a little time and thought into her. My idea for a slight rework to her would maybe make her viable again and in the foreseeable future without making her too strong. In essence it would make her similar to Lucian who is viable at all times in the ADC role.
Disclaimer: I'm trash at math so none was used (no solid stat values). This Idea is based purely on conjecture and should be seen as such. This is an original idea though but if someone else has mentioned it, I'm sorry for riposting.
The Idea: So the biggest thing I can see that holds Kindred back is their ability to either get stacks or not. If you get 15 kills but 0 stacks your damage will fall off very quickly vs if you got 7 kills for 7 stacks. Even though I main Kindred, getting stacks is so hard now. People immediately play safer when marked, and invading jungle for camp marks is only good for a couple and hella dangerous with so much mobility and burst champs(Ryze, Leblanc, Katarina, Jayce) coming into meta. Even getting a mark off the enemy jungler is harder now with Kha, Rengar, and Lee Sin moving up in popularity and if it's not them it's some tank jungler who you might get one early mark off of then never be able to touch again. Basically, people are getting more use to them, playing smarter, and out scaling them. I think a way to help with this is to Change their passive to be more like Rengar's. He gets increases to his dmg for Kills onto different champs, getting a bigger buff once he has killed all 5 players at least once. Now just giving Kindred the same passive wouldn't make sense since they are more Marksman/Assassins then pure Assassins but what if it worked in a similar fashion that built up over time?
You start the game and have a champ selector that works more like Rengars where you don't click on anyone. Unlike Rengars the champ blips work more as progress orbs. So for Rengar you either get the kill or nothing but with Kindred it slowly builds up. Maybe like 4 assists (or 2) count for a completed Mark on a champ and then a full kill counts as half a mark or a full completion of the mark (kinda depends on the scaling they will get or how hard it is to write this into the program). Let's say that once Kindred as completed a mark for each individual champ on the other team, the completion of this counts for the equivalent of 6-8 Marks the way things are now (which is what you need to be viable in the late game). You move Kindreds marks off Scuttle and Small camps and only put them on Dragon, Baron, Spider, and Rift Herald (maybe put them on enemy buffs). This would also fix Solo Q Kindred's life long problem of getting their team to work with them and actually going for objectives. When I first played Kindred all I did was go for Stacks and Kills cause doing objectives wasn't as worth and more risky. Now! Once they obtain all marks THEN you go back to the original marking system where the player selects a target and obtains a mark that way.
Secondary idea (not quite as thought out, might be op): Buff Kindreds ult to benefit allies more than the enemy. Most champs that are out don't care if they ult because enemies will get much more Hp back when it breaks and then just kill them. Idk what can be done with that. Maybe give them a flat heal and Kindreds team a bigger one. Or maybe give Kindred double the heal since it is their ult and they are two spirits, or give them a heal and maybe some other form of buff in defense or offense to not make it even. Might be too op idk. I just feel like their ult is the only one in the game that has like a 50/50 chance of helping or hurting. (INB4 someone says Bard because his ult is far easier to make proper use of and is much more of a 80/20 at best for help or harm).
Conclusion: I just want Kindred to be viable at all times really. They way things are going it doesn't look like they will be for quite some time. I like playing Kindred and I still do but not in ranked. There are too many picks that are just far and away better than
. I do not want her to be broken again, just Tier one. If this is too hard to understand but their is an actual interest in the idea I will do my best to make a video to better describe my idea. GL summoners.