Cassiopeia the Poison Mage is POWERING UP from POISONING her opponent. Not DEBILITATING them instead

Here's my daily topic on all the many many MANY things wrong with Cassiopeia's rework. The list goes on, but the main points have been...

-the fundamental problems of turning her into "AP Rambo" with her E-focused kit

-how your rework exclusively caters to only on side of a fanbase while shredding evidence that the other side ever existing

-the inherent fallacy in reworking her for being an "oppressive lane-bully"

-forcing the hyper-carry role down her tiny throat (repeatedly touched upon in all the points above)

-the single-target direct damage focus at the expense of her AoE DoT identity she had before (touched upon above)

-the Passive and how it runs contrary to what she should be

As you can probably guess from the title and the bolded part, I'm here to talk to you about her Passive.

Aspect of the Serpent is wrong in so many ways I can literally separate them into layers!

Let's start at the top layer, the fundamental problem with this Passive on her kit.

** ---1) Cassiopeia is growing in power by POISONING her opponent. Or to put it another way, she is spending more time STRENGTHENING HERSELF rather than WEAKENING HER OPPONENT--- **

Cassiopeia is not . She is not or even . She is not an upgrading cyborg like . So with ALL those champions you decided to give this evolving Passive to, why do you give it to the SOLE champion in the game where such a power literally works against the champion's theme?

**There is an inherent disconnect when you have a POISON MAGE channel poison onto her opponent...so that she can make her biceps grow bigger. **Common sense itself should have told you that the act of introducing a harmful agent into your opponent should work to weaken them over a period of time. Instead of permanently granting her strength, her poison should do the opposite of that, but to her opponents instead. THAT is the poison fantasy you claim to understand.

For reference, go watch the final episode of Season 3 of Legend of Korra. Look at how that mercury poisoning ****ed her up real good. Zaheer didn't grow a bulge just because he watched Korra get injected by poison. Korra herself got visibly weakened and ****ed up even after the fight is over. THAT is POISON.

** --- 2) It supports your plan to make her into a Hyper-Carry, which is NOT the direction she should be going in the first place! ---** This is just logic. When you have something that is bad...the last thing you need to do is to make something else that supports that which is bad.

Your problem is that you made her a hyper-carry --> making her Passive support such a direction makes your problem worse.

** ---3) Your claim that her Passive is supposed to reflect her CURSE comes off as flimsy after you look at her as a champion.--- **

First, you only gave this explanation out several weeks after the rework came out and you received more and more criticisms over the rework. Secondly, you keep calling it "Cassiopeia embracing the curse". So...what is there to embrace? Cassiopeia isn't a champion slowly being cursed into what she is, she IS the cursed being already. Your argument that she is letting the curse slowly consume her, yet in return she grows stronger doesn't hold any grounds at all because she already let it happen.

If this is a curse, WHAT is the harm in the curse that makes embracing it so difficult? All I can see is that she gets her badass snake-tail, and if that really was the punishment of the curse, guess what, that speaks against your idea to make her Passive a "embracing the curse" because she begins the game as she is. She doesn't start off as a human with human abilities, she starts off as a lamia with all her poison-y torso-sized fang-throw-y powers.

4) The very fact that it's based off milestones is painfully unsatisfying, period.

She has 500 stacks, and among those 500 stacks,** 497 of those stacks do not do jack!** Unlike Thresh, Sion, etc. where each stack brings something to the table, it is VERY unsatisfying to build those stacks when they don't do a thing for her. When confronted with the possibility of making each stack give her something,

you said this:

When the rewards are unnoticeably small, do they still feel rewarding?

and I said this:

You bring the point where if unnoticeably small rewards will do anything for her at all, but let me counter with this.

What is more unnoticeably small? A very miniscule bonus...or no bonus at all?

Because this is what really stinks about stacking her Passive. She has 500 stacks. 497 of those stacks are unrewarding and disappointing.

and this:

But if you're still so crazy about making her an unfun hyper-carry, atleast make her Passive less unsatisfying by giving it TWO separate aspects.

    **The first aspect are your milestone rewards that comes far and few inbetween.**

    **The second aspect is a per-stack aspect where each and every single one of her stack will do something like make her poisons stronger or something.**

I should add that I am against the idea of her having a stacking Passive because it enforces her hyper-carry identity that you are forcing onto her. No matter how you look at it, items aside, a full stack Cassiopeia will always be stronger than a no-stack Cassiopeia. But this is one direction you could have brought to make a poor direction less rocky at the very least.

** ---5) This Final point is something you actually acknowledged. It feels like a shackle while other champions with stacking or evolving Passives do not feel shackled.--- **

There is two aspects to this point here.

i) NOTICE, how many of those stacking Passives HAVE NO LIMIT to their growing power! Sion, Thresh, Veigar, Nasus. Their power is limitless! When you cap a champion's stack at a fixed amount, that makes it feel like a shackle! It makes it feel like their ceiling is what they SHOULD have been from the start and any point below their max stacks is just you artificially gating their laning phase (refer to: -the inherent fallacy in reworking her for being an "oppressive lane-bully"...)

ii) Kha'zix, Syndra, and Viktor have a feeling of being shackled too, trust me, I play those champions, I know them, I MAINED pre-rework Viktor. Shackling is ESPECIALLY relevant to Kha'zix whose abilities are genuinely crap without their evolutions. But do you know why those Passives work for those champions and not for Cassiopeia?

!!! Because unlike Cassiopeia, shackling powers make perfect sense for those champions !!!

and are starting off "infantile" and weak, they are growing in power through their own unique means. is literally shackled by her douche of a master. And guess what? Even WHEN such a Passive fits them, they can still fail in gameplay. Look at Syndra's Passive, it's boring, not a lot of people like them, there is little in terms of decision making. It FITS her perfectly unlike Cassiopeia, but it's not a FUN Passive that really adds anything substantial to her kit at all. I'd argue Viktor is edging towards that too because all Viktor's are the same in the end just like how all Syndra's are the same. The ONLY successful case imo is Kha'zix.......................on a theoretical basis. Kha'zix can be quite different based on what he evolves as he has limited evolution points. I say theoretical, because who are we kidding here? Who's not going to evolve his wings?

Again just like in my previous threads. 1) is my core and more pressing issue that you seem to be ignoring. The others are certainly problems, but solve #1, and all the other issues would not be nearly as bad.

---

I want to add that NOBODY HATES YOU. Nobody wants you to resign or all that bs. Nobody denies that her old kit had it's problems that needed fixing. It was your job to fix those issues. What we DO hate however...is the rework.. Are we passionate? Yeah of course, just LOOK at what the rework did to her. Is still doing to her! Your rework is the One Ring. Cassiopeia is Smeagol. Except we don't have any Fellowship of the Ring.

(the fact that you never asked Cass fans what they think she was or SHOULD be prior to starting on making her rework, however, certainly didn't help)