Riot Stashu, where the HELL are you?

Don't worry, she's being picked a lot and doing well in EULCS and LCK, so obviously Riot did a good job reworking her and all her detractors were wrong, so she doesn't need work anymore.

Oh wait, that's exactly what we should be worried about.

Right now she's probably the most OP champ that nobody actually likes to play, and both of those are huge issues. Cass needs work done ASAP.

RIP Stashu, his own creation killed him.

I mean, I'm not sure how much more work he can really do. For better or worse, Cass has been accepted in this iteration. Now all they're going to do is play with her numbers. Thats really how all reworks go.

I said it once, I'll say it again: they created a champion that doesn't fit the meta so they have to make her sleeper op to actually fit a role. The moment she catches on ... She's going to get the nerf bat because her kit doesn't offer any "OMGBIGPLAYS" visuals or ideal tools for the role (just oppressing her opponent). It's sustain spam. The style, the oppressive damage, all of it puts a huge target on her for nerfs the moment she catches on.

So the nerfs will come and she will end up right back where we started... Only with a stripped identity.

Edit: my phone swipe had dropped some oddball words in....

I think you guys should let it go. They rarely go back on things unless it's a popular champion like Lee Sin.

Trundle, Karma, Cass, Xerath, all really underplayed. All were reworked. Xerath actually sees play now though.

Riot Stashu, Where are you We got some work to do now

Riot Stashu, where are you We need some help from you now

And Riot Stashu if you come through you're gonna have yourself a poro snack

Below is from a post I made before that pretty much sums up how I feel about this. TL;DR For better or worse, Cassiopeia could get away with playing as a poke mage and mostly ignoring Twin Fang and play a DPS mage with Twin Fang because of her sheer damage across the board of her kit. If it's necessary for Riot to force one of these playstyles and getting rid of the other, I think they should just revert her and leave her with her awkward but fun kit she had before. Deadly Cadence was a great passive considering it conserved mana while still being engaging.

About her passive- indeed it's a shackle. It's arbitrarily giving her power (encouraging her to build a lot of straight ap to get the most of the percentage) and the CDR bonus is convenient but Cassiopeia would not find CDR as useful as, say, a Lux would. But at this point you can afford for it be irrelevant, for better or worse. I'm still a damn potent force to be reckoned with in lane and I can ignore the passive... but the fact that we're ignoring shows how dodgy the design is.

What boggles my mind is that they buffed possibly the reason why Cassiopeia was such a huge lane bully in the first place. Think about it when you played normals or in a match that people didn't know what Cassiopeia did. They try to harass you with spells and then auto harass you for not moving back. Except you're shredding them because of Twin Fang's cooldown and they die or get zoned out because there's no way they can keep up with how spammy it's cooldown is. Obviously that's not the case anymore when we face more experienced players to respect Cassi's small but VERY dangerous zone of control, but Stashu straight up buffed the most lane bully aspect of Cassiopeia's kit. The reason she could shit on melees and most people from the 700 range of twin fang. Her poke was strong to be sure, but it wasn't on par with Syndra or Ziggs when they were popular and strong, and the fact that they beat her because they could stay out of her wheelhouse shows that.

http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=4613331#post4613331 This is Brackhar's post on Cassiopeia, her original designer. He says he wanted to create a champ similar to Anivia, but more sustained damage and mobile rather than slow and bursty. Before her rework Cassiopeia DID have many "Anti-Anivia" elements. Her Miasma was a great zoning tool not on par but similar with Anivia's Glacial Shroud. Frost Bite and Twin Fang both served as sort of a proc the mark mechanic because they did mediocre damage on their own but with the champ's other abilities they did high damage. Every other ability in both of these champions' kit was strong on it's own, which is the big point here. Anyway, Noxious Blast and Flash Frost... both high damage spells, one spammy poke spell that enhanced Cassi's kiting, the other a powerful nuke and stun for Anivia. Even crystallize and Petrifying Gaze are similar in the sense of being great "pick off" tools. With Cassi's new raw power through playstyle I feel like some of the zone control/anti Anivia elements are... I don't wanna say gone but not the same.

Speaking of oppressive lane bullying, though, and Cassiopeia's Twin Fang sucking the power out of her kit, why does her E restore a percentage of maximum mana? That's the reason why she's so overbearing in lane. Hell, she's just as good in lane as if not better now IMO because in late game teamfights my short range zones me out. Anyways, that mana restore is very frustrating for the enemy laner to deal with because a well played Cassi's never going to be OOM, and with the health restore at 100 stacks she won't be forced to go B unless someone can 100-0 burst her.

Here's another forum post, among others, with Brackhar on Cassiopeia. http://forums.na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=10780961#10780961 He's discussing Cassiopeia's Deadly Cadence passive, and, what do you know, he inadvertently predicts that Cassiopeia would have to build a huge mana pool without it, which she did after her rework for some time. Anyways, I feel like Deadly Cadence is a mana sustain passive that's actually GOOD. It's not generic, it makes sense considering how spammy a champ Cassiopeia is, it's not boring to use, ** and overall quite fair for the opponent and Cassiopeia. She can keep her mana constraints on par with most other mages that way, but she's still losing mana, so the opponent can feel satisfied at repeatedly dodging. With the mana restore on Cassi's E now, I bet it can feel never ending for the opponent. Anyways, Deadly Cadence was a mana passive I actually liked; it had a lot of engaging gameplay for it's sole purpose being mana conservation, and I would be glad to have it back, especially since Cassi's got some mana cost increases on PBE.

It's a shame though. I feel like while Cassiopeia wasn't perfect before (you've and several others have mentioned preferring poke style vs all in with Twin Fang playstyle) maybe a reversion of the rework is the best way to go. Not this rework, ANY rework because if you're not snubbing one half of Cassi's fan base, you're snubbing the other due to her 2 vastly different styles of play. Maybe just leaving her as was is the best way to go.

I'd love to talk about this with other Cassi players as well though, despite them probably being higher rank than me and playing for more than the mere year and a quarter I got with her before the rework. :P

If you go on lolking, you'll see that Cass actually has the highest win rate of all champs currently. And even when she isn't number 1, she's been in the top 5 for a while now. Yes I know win rates don't mean everything, but you can't completely invalidate them either.