Saw some thoughts on Rek'Sai on Facebook, decided to share.

Not sure if this has been posted yet, but a Facebook page by the name of Foxdroplol recently posted their thoughts about Rek'Sai. The following is not my own, all credit goes to Foxdroplol.

Hey guys!

Rek'sai has been out for over a week now and I wanted to share my thoughts on her as a champion and the problems she has both thematically and from a balance stand point. Bear in mind this is all from a jungle point of view.

The first we saw of Rek'Sai was during her cinematic titled "The Terror Beneath". It featured a band of stragglers traversing a desert while being hunted by the Void Burrower herself. She is portrayed as a stealthy inescapable hunter that stalks and obliterates her hapless prey.

Sadly, her image conveyed from the cinematic and the actuality of her in game performance vary greatly.

First off, Rek'Sai is anything but inescapable. She has no real CC aside from her unburrowing which already requires you to be standing on top of the target. In addition to that, her burrowed E (the gap closer that creates tunnels) is slow, clunky, and unreliable as it can be interrupted mid-travel. There's even a bug where if you try to use it to go over a tight wall, you'll be teleported back to your original tunnel. Seems kinda odd considering she's supposed to, thematically, be underground (the ability is called "Tunnel" for goodness sake!).

Her next problem is with her unburrowed E, Furious Bite. It is incredibly unreliable in most situations and only really useful for extended fights/duels, which the enemy player should be smart enough to avoid and compounded by the fact that all you need to do to avoid a Rek'Sai is to just walk away from her. The E only does decent damage at high amounts of fury which is hard to achieve in a gank when you're running on a timer - on top of this, it's impossible to store fury before initiating a gank because it's consumed when you travel. It's worth mentioning that none of this is a problem for top lane Rek'Sai.

Her tunnel network and Ultimate are probably the most unique and thematic elements of Rek'Sai's kit. In theory, it really sells that 'unseen burrowing predator' image that the cinematic first offered. In actuality, they too leave a lot to be desired. The latter relies exclusively on the former, meaning the worse your tunnel positions are then the worse your Ultis will be.

Unfortunately it's almost impossible to maintain a decent tunnel network as they're so easy to spot and remove. It takes two seconds to stomp them and they're easily visible on both the screen AND the minimap. If they're not in your jungle, don't expect them to last more than a minute - if you're behind in game then even your own jungle isn't going to house them. It's also impossible to be sneaky and hide the tunnels in a bush, as A) no bush is big enough for both an entrance and an exit (Kappa) and B) there's still a trail that leads between them.

Like I said, when your tunnel network sucks then your Ultis will too. This means that it's perfectly possible you'll not get a valuable Ult off all game and just using it to TP back to your jungle which seems like a total waste. Unless you're relying on your enemies to leave up pre-existing tunnels on top of where they're fighting (which they won't), then sad to say best case scenario is to Ult to a relatively nearby tunnel, run to the fight and try to get there before it's too late to have a meaningful impact. Or try to cut someone off who's escaping in to your jungle. Hell, even if it WERE possible to TP straight in to a fight, the Ulti animation is so obvious and drawn out that enemies can easily just walk away. Imagine how bad TF Ults would be if he were melee and didn't have that gold card.

It's also kind of silly that, judging by the cooldown of the Ulti, it's regarded as a global (same CD at rank 1 as Panth's). It is nowhere near comparable.

But hey at least it gives passive attack speed.

I also want to give a shoutout the Q ability in burrow form. Like what even is that meant to be? It does pitiful damage, is thinner than an American college student's wallet, and doesn't slow. So far it's greatest use has been with cheesy AP builds.

There are some really cool features with Rek'Sai that DO make her feel like that unseen donger. The fact you can jump back through your tunnels and the ability to track footsteps in burrow farm come to mind. But sadly, in my opinion, she's lacking too much from what we saw in her teaser cinematic.

Imo she works better now as a top laner than jungler.

So what do you think of her? Hope you enjoyed this longer piece.