To the players that have been around for awhile, what exactly was so bad about pre-nerf Kassadin?

He'd survive the lane phase with relative ease, then proceed to jump in, silence, get off his burst and fuck off, thereby winning all trades forever.

Repeated ad nauseam, combined with being impossible to chase down.

He's not viable now, but I honestly think the game's better off without him.

No risk 100-0 tanky assassin, with free flashes.

He had a point and click silence and a flash with a 5-6 second cd max rank and aoe damage that applied on hits built into his incredibly oppressive and overly mobile kit. He had an auto steroid that would shut you down the moment he got within flashing distance because of how quickly he could completely cripple you. Yeah, he's still viable. He's still bullshit.

His Ult had longer range and his Q silenced instead of interrupting channels. He was so hard to escape and catch that using Iceborn Gauntlet on him was actually a thing.

Think of a tanky leblanc with even more mobility, better aoe damage and, no skillshot.

You could build him as a mana tank and kill, split-push, do whatever you wanted and no one could stop you. His only weak phase was pre 6, but even if you died a few times you would still roll face.

Used to be one of the most OP champions on Dominion, along with Jayce before his nerfs.

Old Kassadin was tanky, more mobile than any of the current "Hyper Mobile" champions (More mobile than anything but full MS Rammus), hit like a Talon, had anti-magic damage passive, spammable CC, Cone nuke that had basically no cooldown in a teamfight.

i just started again after a long break so im actually not familiar with how he was nerfed. But yes at one point he was obviously and by far the most op champ in the game. Imagine what you could do in a game if your flash had a 5 second cooldown and you could kill any adc or apc in about 1 second. Basically if kassadin didnt finish a game with a score like 30/2/3 then the player was terrible.

It was popular to build him tanky...since he was sortof melee range and i guesss the idea was 'just in case you get ccd after rifting into enemy team'. But it wasnt actually necessary. The rare times pros were allowed to play kassadin they just went glass cannon. Cause you jsut flash kill flash out. Nobody could stop you. And it was sad being an adc with kassadin on enemy team. he could literrally appear from nowhere and kill you at any second. Your average survival time outside base was like 10 seconds.

Targeted silence with hyper mobility and really huge damage plus free defense by passive. He was way too safe even against assassins.

OG Kassadin was literally 100% permaban Season 2. He was a hyper-mobile assassin in a time where wallhops were rare and a champion was considered mobile if they had a single speedboost in their kit. So they reworked him (AKA remove his silence and gut all his ratios) and he was considered trash tier until some chinese teams started playing him in season 5. He was strong but never felt overbearing, especially since nowadays literally every champion has a wallhop, but Riot didn't see it that way so balance team got to work and broke his legs with the nerf bat. He is overnerfed garbage tier right now and has been essentially removed from the game, it's going to take serious buffs or a massive meta shift for him to become remotely viable again.

He was current Ahri but without silience.