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Evelynn - Agony's Embrace

Adrian Umbra·3/18/2015, 4:50:20 PM·6 votes·1,805 views

Since there's been some more Eve discussion on the boards lately thanks to some changes coming on the PBE, I wanted to take the opportunity to bring up one of the sore points for many Eve players since the changes that killed midlane Eve: her ultimate. At the moment, I personally regard Evelynn's ultimate as one of the weakest in the game, with my reasonings below.

Currently, her ultimate deals 15/20/25 (+0.01AP) % current health damage, provides a 30/50/70% slow for 2 seconds, and grants 150/225/300 shield per champion hit for 6 seconds, up to a maximum of 750/1125/1500 points. The CD is 150/120/90 seconds. Since the ability is divided mainly into three parts, I'll be breaking down her ultimate mainly based around those three.

Damage: Let's get this out of the way right now, 15-25% current health damage is weak, especially for an ultimate. The idea sounds really cool, having this vision of shredding everyone's health away so that you can come in and clean up, but in practice MR cuts this damage incredibly hard. A lack of minimum damage means that this ability is the only damage ability in the game that cannot kill a target, even at 1 HP (Proof at bottom). For an ultimate, this is incredibly unsatisfying to use, as you watch your character deal comparable damage to Mundo's cleaver on over thirty times the cooldown with no possibility to score a kill. An assassin who cannot kill anything is pointless.

https://youtu.be/1NlN3ZgByCE?t=1m5s

Crowd Control (The slow): The is the main thing Eve gets out of her ultimate when she hits level 6. At 30% for two seconds, most champions who provide CC will have outclassed her well before she gets her ultimate, but given her potential to sneak past wards, the lack of power here might be forgivable. This part of the ability also scales quite well, reaching 70% by the end of the game. A solid teamfight contribution, though one that's losing more and more relevance due to mobility creep.

The Shield: Probably the most out of place aspect of Evelynn's ultimate and the main reason why she's built bruiser rather than full on assassin. The shield is a solid value, adding up to a good defensive bulwark if you manage to tag most of the enemy team with her ultimate. However, given that Evelynn is now going to be in the center of a teamfight, well within range of the enemy team who are all informed she's coming, the shield isn't going to mean much unless she builds heavily into resistances, which is the idea behind most of her current builds. As an ability for an assassin, it just feels out of place and prioritizes using the ultimate on the full enemy team and throwing yourself into the brawl over picking off stragglers and finishing weakened opponents.

Overall, Eve's ultimate dumps a lot of its power into CC and defense, which are really strange places to be pointing an assassin toward. The ultimate generally feels unrewarding to use, especially from an assassination standpoint. To top this all off, it's gated in early levels by an incredibly high cooldown, on par with Amumu and Twisted Fate. Agony's Embrace needs a change if Evelynn's going to become a health assassin once again.

Some possibilities:

  1. Either remove the damage completely, make it max health, or make it flat. Current health damage does absolutely nothing for her and was a pretty strange change in the first place. The range can be reduced for flat/max damage so that you don't have Eve assassinating people out of nowhere (though I thought that was part of her theme?), but as it stands the damage is consuming power budget without doing anything at all.
  2. Remove or rework the shield. Thematically, a shield makes very little sense on an assassin of the night who relies on stealth and isolation to rip her foes to shreds and it takes up a huge chunk of her ult's power budget.
  3. Flatten the curve. Strangely enough for an assassin who focuses heavily on the early game, Agony's Embrace has a huge amount of power in the slow and cooldown invested in lategame. Adjusting the slow to 40/50/60% instead of 30/50/70% and/or the cooldown from 150/120/90 to 130/120/110 would increase her early game power (emphasizing her strengths) while giving her more appreciable weakness lategame.

Do you guys agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think. Let's see if we can get a Rioter such as @Scarizard or @Gypsylord to lend their thoughts.

TL;DR: Eve's ult is weak, especially in damage and its long cooldown and doesn't fit her thematically. Needs some changes, suggestions outlined above.

Edit: I've been getting a lot of replies saying Eve has more problems than just her ult and that a huge amount of her power budget is in her passive. I'm looking to fix her ult. Not Eve as a whole, but her ult. I realize there are other problems that she has. Riot can sort out those on their own.

As for the power budget in her passive, Riot will be adding a kind of ward that will ping the map whenever an enemy champion approaches, regardless of their visibility status, called the Mandrake ward. This will be a direct nerf to the power of Eve's passive and one that should allow Riot some room to buff her. In addition, you'll notice that I'm not suggesting flat out buffing her ult, just adjusting what's there.

15 Comments

GGMystic3/19/2015, 4:44:04 PM3 votes

It saddens me to see that the Eve changes in PBE do little to address her problems. Regarding her ult, I completely agree with you. Instead of making its damage only current health, they could even make it a combination of current health + flat, similarly to Xin's ult.

From what I can tell, Riot seems to think that Eve's early game is fine, so they're trying to help her better transition into mid-late game. If that wasn't the case, they would had already attempted to change the damage on either her Q or E.

catastrophicSkil3/18/2015, 6:33:06 PM2 votes

evelynn's problem is not with her ult it is with the fact that her damage in the early game is no longer scary espcially when she can't farm jungle then directly gank lanes like most champions that are strong in the jungle can but with the recent jungle nerfs i haven't tested it out because Sej is freelo lol

Unless you run lifesteal quints which hurts her damage

i would love to see evelynn be viable again actually i think the new tank item mightt be OK on her because the AP and AD jungle item make it hard for her to be in melee range for very long if we build evelynn with cinder how when she builds HP she will obtain enough bonus HP where she can sneak in another offensive item for example Warmogs/Cinder/Trinity/GA/BOTRK/Boots would make her fairly tanky in the late game and still give her decent damage

You could replace Bortk with maybe LW/Black cleaver depending on what would be better

Linna Excel3/19/2015, 5:21:34 PM2 votes

Evelynn needs more work and I think fixing the ult is a good place to start.

catastrophicSkil3/18/2015, 7:14:07 PM1 votes

Her ult is meaningful..... l it is an AMAZING engage tool it is not meant to be used last second to snipe kills this was made very clear when they made that initial nerf as evelynn you want to position yourself so you are the second champion in no longer is eve the champ you can pick into any team comp she is the champ that REQUIRES synergy with at least 1 other champ to work well such as leona/malphite/sona basically someone with a hard engage.

positioning with evelynn is extremely important too i would know i understand you played her for 2 years so have i. i think i have about 300ish games on her and is honestly my fav champ to play

i think they need to reverse the change to her Q that weakened her early game but made her late game a bit better with stronger scaling as you leveled the ability and maybe give her ult AD scaling maybe like .04

they are actually currently buffing her passive where she will go invis after 6/5/4/3 at level 1/6/11/16 which is pretty nice because it will allow her to avoid green wards more easily later in the game/ they are also changing her W so it gets lower on CD with each melee attack but they are removing the 4 ms on hit i'm indifferent about this change. don't expect to see a damage buff if there is one id see her Base stats played with slightly

Adrian Umbra3/18/2015, 5:37:09 PM1 votes

First and final bump

LongHair Fox3/19/2015, 5:05:43 PM1 votes

Main problem with eve is that she has extremely low cd on her spells outside of her ultimate so if she can assassinate someone without it then she can just keep doing so.

She has a lot of problems and I don't think you can fix one of them independently of the others.

Droogzy3/19/2015, 5:26:29 PM1 votes

I personally love Evelynn's play style, but from the standpoint of the assassin's perspective, I can certainly understand the issue. I don't play her as an assassin and have always gone bruiser, but nothing about her kit screams assassin other then her invisibility. Her ultimate does nothing from the standpoint of an assassin.

Not only that, I would consider it to actually be an engage tool...Assassins do NOT engage, they wait for the fight to start, then go in for the clean up.

However the reason why the ultimate is so lackluster I would argue is because of Evelynn's passive.

You said that her ultimate is probably one of the worst ultimate in the game, I personally disagree (MF ultimate to me is the worst :p ), although if you're arguing from the standpoint of an assassin, you do have a point, it definitely could be considered the worst as it does nothing for an assassin game play. But her passive is arguably one of the best hands down in the game. I can't really think of another passive which influences a champion's play style so heavily like Evelynn's.

So in short, something needs to go. Either the invisibility needs to be tweaked to give the ultimate more oomph, or we keep the ultimate the way it is since her passive is so powerful. Her biggest problem lies in the fact her power budget lies so much in her perma stealth, her perma stealth was actually why I started playing her, it made her so good in lower elos.