What If Siphoning Strike Stacked on Champion Hits?
(TL;DR at the bottom)
Nasus is a pretty fun and successful champion, and the recent changes to his ult only improved him. While he's not unhealthy or in a bad state by any stretch, or at least not a hot button champion on Boards, it still feels like there could be some improvements to him. Many players have discussed converting his autoattack extenders (on Q and R) into increased basic attack range, but here I want to talk about his Q, and specifically how it often leads to a conflict between his objectives and his fantasy.
At the core of Nasus's gameplay fantasy is infinite damage stacking: before infinite scaling mechanics became more common, he was the only champion, alongside Veigar, who had no upper limit on how much damage he could deal. This also reflects in his gameplay, where he usually builds almost full tank and hits like a truck. However, the way he builds up to that state is mostly by farming minions: in any other lane, this would be mostly fine, but top laners are at the largest risk of isolating themselves and splitpushing all game. Nasus is guilty of this, not because he can't contribute to his team (he has extremely powerful crowd control and can soak up a ton of damage), but because he's always torn between farming up towards his late-game fantasy, and sacrificing that, however temporarily, to help others out.
In higher elos, this happens less often, as Nasus players have a clearer idea of when they should stop farming, and start unleashing The Cane on the enemy team, but at lower elos there's no clear indication of when to do that, and in either case** it doesn't feel great to have to choose between fulfilling one's own fantasy and winning the game**. Ultimately, one should lead to the other, and there shouldn't be a conflict between the two. In more practical gameplay terms, this often leads to Nasus playing hyper-passively early game, ignoring his opponent while trying to farm as efficiently as possible, which doesn't make for the most interesting laning phase for either player.
One solution could be to cap his Q damage, but that would break his infini-scaling fantasy, and so might not be the best choice. An alternative, however, would be to switch his Q stacking by rewarding Nasus for striking enemy champions with Q, rather than just for farming: instead of being rewarded for passive play, Nasus would be encouraged to play aggressively and seek out his targets. Ganking bot would mean having twice the potential targets to stack off of, and he'd be encouraged to join his team in group plays for the same reasons. Instead of being forced to choose between helping out his team and getting ridiculous stacks, Nasus would be able to do both at the same time, which would be far more interesting for him and his opponents.
Obviously, this might need adjustments afterwards, e.g. higher stacks per successfull Q hit, stacks on large monster strikes for jungle Nasus, perhaps even tower strikes to encourage taking objectives, and perhaps a shift towards slightly better early game power to let him survive more frequent trades, but ultimately this would end up helping him a lot. Nasus currently doesn't have many early game options besides hard-farming Q stacks, and this kind of switch would give him and his laning opponent much more interesting gameplay.
TL;DR: Switching Nasus's Q stacking to hitting champions (and perhaps large monsters and towers), rather than killing any unit (which mostly boils down to farming minions), and balancing him around that, could make him significantly more fun to play and play against, as he'd no longer be encouraged to play ultra-passively and farm all game.
