Tears of a Jayce Player

Tl;dr - I hate the current position Jayce is in and he either needs a kit fix or item changes to help him not be useless.

So this is mainly just a massive rant on Jayce. I began the game with Jayce's release and fell in love with his design and playstyle and mained him in season 3 and some of 4. I've been trying desperately for the last several weeks to make Jayce playable in the new season with zero success. I actually thought looking at the new AD item changes that Jayce would actually be in a pretty good spot: Essence Reaver, Black Cleaver, etc. O boy was I wrong. So here are my biggest concerns with Jayce heading into season 6.

1. Itemization: with the removal of Brutalizer and Tear being gutted awhile ago, Jayce just doesn't seem to have anything to get him going anymore. Tear and Manamune take forever to stack and usually the game ends before they matter. Additionally his two build paths right now are horrible.

a. Essence Reaver/IE Crit Build - Jayce has to get super close to even take advantage of this build and usually ends up just getting blown up as he attempts to get close to his target. This build path is really useless considering the massive nerfs to W that took place a while ago. This build just makes him feels like a second hand adc that has no mobility and has to give up his range to use most of his other damage: adcs that end up in melee range usually don't last too long.

b. Black Cleaver Armor Pen Build - most of the time Jayce has already used his EQ combo before he can build up stacks of Black Cleaver. Again having Brutalizer being split up really hurt this build and Jayce as a whole.

2. Identity: What even is Jayce anymore? His poke has become lackluster at best and feels downright awful mid to late. Most of the damage he does is healed up while he waits an eternity for another combo and using Q by itself is just terrible. His burst is good but once he's jump in to commit is pretty much dead meat if he didn't explode his target in .001 seconds. Who is Jayce anymore? A shitty assassin or a bad adc?

3. Midgame/Lategame: It feels really hard to put any significant pressure on the enemy team as Jayce. EQ combos are more and more lackluster as the game goes on and basically become ignorable. Read above for more context to his poor scaling into the game.

Now there was talk of a Jayce rework/kit tweaks awhile ago and at this point, ripping apart his kit might be the only solution. A pure numbers change would just make him the old OP poking monster: the reason he got gutted in the first place.

Some ideas:

1. Turn Q into a Xerath like ability in which the damage, speed, distance and explosion radius increases with charge while shifting ranged E into some other ability.

2. Hammer Form W... Can we just get a new ability for this one? Its always seemed so out of place and useless (useless you're going AP Jayce of course :P) Like seriously anything would be better than this ability.

3. Qs that go through E could apply on hit affects like Sheen and Manamune. This would make building such items not feel completely useless for a champion that is supposed to sit back and launch massive QE combos. This would add a nice "OOMF" to his damage and lead to some interesting Jayce builds centered after one hits and landing his QE combos with on hit affect items.

Honestly, the most frustrating part is that I have no idea what would actually help Jayce. It just seems like he is in such a horrible spot rn and I hate seeing the champion that got me into playing the game basically unplayable. Any discussion on possible fixes or current attaptions to builds/playstyle would be much appreciated. Can't wait to hear yall's thoughts.

I'll probably make a much longer, detailed post at some point but for now hearing some fresh ideas and commentary on Jayce would be nice. Thank you!

"Our future will be bright" -