Never In My Life Have I Felt More Useless...

...than when I played against Rek'Sai top. This post is a little long so feel free to skip ahead to the end if you want.

I had picked Sion and the laning phase was agony. Any time I had even marginally won a trade, Rek simply pressed W, burrowed, and regenerated every point of damage I had done. Meanwhile, she could pop my shield before the cooldown allowing me to detonate it went off, take me down to half HP before i could react, and could zone me from farming just by being there. Eventually, my jungler (Yi) and mid laner (Yasuo) were kind enough to roam top at the same time. A Sion ult, Yi ult, Yasuo exhaust (don't ask me), and a Yakity Sax later, we had burned her flash and given her jungle Jax and Ezreal mid time to run up and kill all three of us.

I think this story tells us something important. Riot tends to build a champion with one particular role in mind, (in Rek'Sai's case, jungle) but then ignores how the kit can be exploited elsewhere. While in the jungle, Rek'Sai's passive regen is enough to make i so she needs to back less often, in top she only need to back when she realizes she can buy a first back Hydra. In the jungle, her tunnels give her a few "shortcuts" to ignore walls, in a lane, it gives her the mobility of Kassadin with none of the mana cost. In the jungle, her lack of mana encourages her to donate blue to a laner, as a laner, it makes it so cooldowns are all that keep her from going all in whenever she pleases.

I remember reading a post saying that being manaless in combination with being AD meant never needing to back, and only now do I realize how true that is. Between the regen on her passive and any lifesteal she build, Rek Sai almost never needs to base in top ;ane, and when she does, she has a teleport on her R key with less of a cooldown than the summoner spell.

TL;DR: Riot is too narrow-minded when it comes to designing champions. That, or they rush the champions out too quickly too look at the ways they can be exploited.