The Current Big Issue with Rengar
Hey everyone, I have been a rengar main for a solid 2 years now, and I just wanted to post my thoughts about how he is currently being sidelined as a champion, in a hopes that riot will read my suggestion and consider possible changes to him. Lets be honest. Games of league of legends right now are ending from the 25-35 minute mark, and really aren't going much further than that. The days of everyone level 18 team fighting come maybe once every 10 games or so. A lot of these late game champions like vayne, trist, kat, rengar, and many more are being pushed out of the meta because of their easily abusable early game issues.
In rengar's case, he falls way behind other junglers because of his inability to gank before level 6. Most other junglers currently in the meta have a reliable engage on ganks. Xin and master yi have their dash, graves and other ranged junglers have the range and some sort of soft cc, and almost everyone can unload their combo if they can get close enough to the laner. However, before level 6, especially in the mid lane, rengar has no reliable gank chance, at all. Because the bush is too far from the lane, good mid laners will rarely play to one side. If you try to walk out, you'll never get close enough to the enemy laner to get 4 stacks, and they walk away. As for top and bottom lane, the only way to gank there is to do it in lane when your lane can shove out, and that doesn't always happen either. It becomes very easy for the enemy jungle to snowball the lanes when rengar either has to hard farm until 6, or have very weak ganks. he does have a strong 1 vs 1 in the jungle, but with death timers lowered, it doesn't have as much of an impact when he gets that 1 vs 1 kill.
After 6, rengar has ult, and a reliable way to engage for ganks. However, even if he is not behind at that point, the cooldown on his ult is 2 minutes. Every time he uses it, the enemy team has a 2 minute window where they know that rengar's ganks will either be bad, or just non existent. By the time rengar hits level 11, the laning phase is over. I would say that his mid game is healthy, because he can find picks with his damage, and snowball the game for his team. However, the early game often prevents him from doing this, and the mid game always feels like playing from behind instead of starting a snowball.
To fix a lot of rengar issues, it could come simply from one or two minor changes. You could give rengar ult resets on kills within 3 seconds of his last leap from ultimate. This way, it gives him a reliable way to use ult to affect the game and rewards him for using it properly. Also, the stealth and leap have a 2 second buffer from cast, so the reset wouldn't be very useful in later game teamfights. Even if the reset only cut the cooldown instead of refreshing it, this would help rengar scale into the mid game properly, and make him a force against other early game meta junglers right now. They could also introduce more damage early into his kit at the cost of scaling, so it feels a lot easier to make early game plays, even though it is difficult, and in the later game, people will experience less of the "no counterplay" vibe from rengar. Finally, a third option for rengar is to just give him a 0.5 second buffer to leap after he gets out of a bush. This gives him just the range he needs to make reliable ganks in the early game, without affecting the way he is played as a champion at all.
Overall, I think rengar right now has to do a lot of outsmarting and outplaying to get any kind of lead, whereas other junglers can play out the early game conventionally and still do fairly well. Even a few small buffs would put him into a nice spot in the meta right now, and I really think that it isn't too much to ask. Even if the game and items change to favor rengar, he will still have this underlying issue of being able to get completely outclassed in the early game, unless something is done to make it a little bit easier for him. Thanks to everyone who took the time to read this, and you can like, dislike, or comment on my concerns as you wish, and ill do my best to respond and or explain.
--- BladedWaffle
