The three faces of Kog'Maw

Rebonack··2 votes·390 views

Koggy is, at the moment, a champion with three unique identities all mushed together. He's a long-range auto-attacker, a tank buster, and a poke champion. A champion covering more than one base isn't terribly unusual, but I feel in Koggy's case his lack of focus is hurting his ability to compete with more specialized champions that overlap with him.

Ezreal lacks Koggy's long range auto-attacks and tank-busting, but his Q supplies a good stand-in and potent poke due to its ability to apply OnHit effects in addition to its low cooldown and ease of hitting. Also? Ezreal is mobile.

Vayne lacks Koggy's poke and long-range auto-attacks, but her tank-busting is stronger against anything with 140 or more resist (even including Kog's %resist shred!) and her kit packed with displacement and invisibility allows her to attack at average ADC range without putting her in as much danger of focus.

Tristana lacks Koggy's poke and tank-busting, but her range is up continuously and her displacement affords her an extreme degree of safety. If Tristana is worried about Tanks she can just grab BotRK and Whisper to destroy all that oppose her.

Jinx lacks Koggy's tank-busting, but her poke with ZAP!, always availabile range (with AoE crits!), strong CC, and peerless clean-up potential makes her a far more attractive pick.

Notice a trend here? All these champions have mobility, strong CC, or in some cases BOTH. Now, I don't think Koggy should get strong CC or mobility. Quite the contrary, in fact. If anything, I think the lack of strong CC and mobility is part of what defines Kog. But Koggy should have clear and obvious strengths to make up for the fact that he lacks the mobility that has become very nearly one of the defining features of the Ranger class. Here are some Innate remake ideas meant to help focus Koggy a little more on one of his three identities. That's something Koggy could really use, I think. Something that would help him to have a well-defined reason to pick him over all the other flashy-dashy ADCs that dominate bottom lane.

Poke Kog: Kog'Maw's skills mark targets hit for two seconds with a Void Portal. Kog'maw can bite foes through the Void Portal, allowing him to hit them with a single basic attack regardless of range.

Tank-buster Kog: Kog'Maw's skills and basic attacks mark foes for 5 seconds with stacks of Icathian Surprise. After 3 stacks the stacks are consumed and the target takes magic damage equal to (percentage) of their missing HP.

Long-range auto-attacker Kog: Each consecutive auto-attack against a target increases Kog'Maw's basic attack range against that target, stacking up to (amount).

Walrus Punch: Poor Koggy's Innate doesn't change that much, he just gets his full speed boost right away and can blow himself up after 1 second by reactivating any of his skills. The resulting explosion blasts the victims sky-high, knocking them up for 1 second!

5 Comments

UberAffe1 votes

The long-range aa one sounds like a very interesting mechanic but i think it would be a bit too strong unless it was capped off early which would then make it much less interesting.

An alternate would be an ability that removes the casting animation from his auto attacks, so that you would not stop moving while auto attack for some period of time.

Rebonack1 votes

{quoted}

The long-range aa one sounds like a very interesting mechanic but i think it would be a bit too strong unless it was capped off early which would then make it much less interesting.

Most fights early game are just trades rather than knock-down, drag-out battles. The ramping auto-attack range would mostly be there to allow Koggy to continue focusing a fleeing opponent without compromising his position in a team-fight. This one defiantly isn't an early-game ability.

An alternate would be an ability that removes the casting animation from his auto attacks, so that you would not stop moving while auto attack for some period of time.

Oh God... that would be as bad, if not worse, than Kalista's Innate. No no no, don't go there. Koggy getting mobility is a bad idea.

UberAffe1 votes

I misread part of your post, I was assuming that the increasing aa range was passive not an ability.

As for the alternate ability I agree it would be bad for kog, I just had the idea and put it out there without considering it as part of his kit

Rebonack1 votes

{quoted}

I misread part of your post, I was assuming that the increasing aa range was passive not an ability.

As for the alternate ability I agree it would be bad for kog, I just had the idea and put it out there without considering it as part of his kit

The ramping range increase would be Kog's new Innate replacing his self-destruct. I was just pointing out that the main use of the ability would be in the team-fight phase of the game, not early game. In early game you don't typically auto-attack the same target enough to ramp it up.

And if you like it, feel free to say so in the poll. I'm trying to gather data here, after all.

Rebonack1 votes

One {{summoner:10}} for the glory of conversation!

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