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Can we balance Kassadin?

Tempest3·9/25/2014, 6:15:50 AM·2 votes·1,433 views

Fact: It is difficult to balance a champion around a short-CD semi-flash ultimate. I’ve made several detailed threads about changes I would like to see to Kassadin’s kit all from back when I first joined league through the most recent changes. His kit is currently hard to argue as being “overpowered,” but many of the Kass-haters likely still believe it is just as broken as ever because his ult still exists. Test-playing the 4.17 Soraka got me thinking about some potential counter-play options, so I’m offering them up here for comment.

I think Kassadin’s passive should interact with his ultimate. Making Kassadin extremely vulnerable after riftwalking can hopefully allow for a significant boost in his available damage, while keeping him from being overbearing. Similarly to the old Kha’zix, Kassadin is frequently built as a bruiser, requiring Riot to nerf his offensive stats to keep him in check. However, I feel like this is a poor choice. Instead of attempting to reduce his offensive power to make up for his high defensive power, his defensive power could be adjusted and his offensive power could receive the boost it needs to stay relevant. I think Kassadin should feel like a void assassin. Not a mobile melee fighter.

To reiterate – I want defensive nerfs, and offensive buffs. Offensive buffs are simple number tweaks, so I’ll leave them up in the air for now (feel free to make recommendations), but I will demonstrate what will hopefully be a reasonable defensive nerf.

Passive: Kassadin ignores unit collision Passive “Void Walker”: Kassadin gains X % Magic Resist or Bonus MR; upon riftwalking, this value is [inverted (Kassadin will have negative MR)] or [his MR is reduced by the X %] for 1.5 seconds.

2 Comments

Deep Terror Nami9/25/2014, 6:28:02 AM4 votes

Kassadin

New Passive:

When starting a match with Kassadin, you have a 50/50 chance of your Ultimate being the old Riftwalk with short CD and silence and everything, or becoming a new ability called Void Bowels. When you activate Void Bowels, instead of teleporting towards target location, Kassadin will instead crap his pants.

Boom, balanced. Because 50/50 chance of winning is the definition of balanced, right?

12tales9/25/2014, 6:30:48 AM1 votes

I'd like to see Riot pick one of Force Pulse and Riftwalk, make that ability the focal point of his character, and gut the other. At the moment, he's got two abilities that are fundamentally extremely powerful, and work in tandem to make him almost impossible to kill. To deal with that, Riot's been forced to slash Force Pulse's duration by a huge amount and mana gate Riftwalk so insanely heavily that it's almost unusable outside of combat, which leaves a very unfulfilling character to play, even if he is 'balanced' in a general sense.

If I had any control over Kassadin, I would undo the latest nerfs to his R and W and add scaling per rank back to his W passive. In exchange, I'd make Force Pulse narrower, shorter range and/or lower damage. If Kassadin can output significant damage or assist his team without being forced to use Riftwalk for that purpose, he's going to be an incredibly oppressive champion because almost nobody has kill pressure on a dude with a 700 unit flash off cooldown. By tying Kassadin's damage output to consistent, aggressive use of Riftwalk and sticking to enemies at melee range, you can keep his signature roaming style without also keeping the annoying kiting mage that's so hard to deal with.

Alternatively, I'd be curious to see what would happen if they transferred the slow from his E to his W, a la Trundle's chomp. Obviously with the buffs/un-nerfs that I mentioned above.

tl;dr Yes, you can balance a champion with a low cooldown semi-flash, provided that its use has meaningful tradeoffs (you're low damage if you don't use it, you're squishy and immobile if you do). His current E prevents Riftwalk from having those tradeoffs.