Elise should have benefits to changing forms

Indorfin··11 votes·1,316 views

Elise's current job in a teamfight is pretty boring. You stay in human form, stand behind the adc, and rely on your spells. If someone gets low and is isolated from the rest of the team and doesn't have any escapes left, you might be able to go into spider form and clean up a kill with your Q, but going into melee range before that point is usually an awful idea.

I think that now that Elise's win rate is so low (still rocking 44% last I checked), I think it's a good opportunity to add something to Elise's kit. Adding some incentive to make more use of your form-changing could boost her win rate while making her kit more interesting. Here's some ideas I had for what could happen when she changes forms; I would love to hear the rest of the community's ideas as well.

When entering human form

  • Elise's first spell in human form could be augmented. For example, Q could slow, W could travel faster and farther, and landing E could reduce the cooldown of spider form or repel.
  • Instead of losing the MS buff from spider form, it could decay over the first few seconds of human form, giving her a small window of increased mobility, which could be strong both for playing making with cocoon, and dodging (since human form is smaller than spider).
  • All of Elise's remaining spiderlings could deal AoE damage and/or slow when Elise changes

When entering spider form

  • Elise could gain a small, short duration shield (similar to Sona's, so that it would provide a narrow window of opportunity)
  • Elise's first auto or Q in spider form could deal bonus damage or apply Grievous Wounds.
  • Elise could gain lifesteal and/or spell vamp for a brief duration.
  • Elise could temporarily have the increased resistances that her spider form originally had.
  • Elise could emit a randuins-like slow when she changes.

11 Comments

Zahz5 votes

that sounds like she isnt being played right

Angry Monster4 votes

stand behind the adc

if that is how you are playing, you are part of the reason the win rate is low.

TheKingDodo

never heard of adc Braum?

junglerboy162 votes

...As if getting almost twice as many skills as most other champs wasn't enough. She gets spiderlings in spider form, and charges them in human form. They are already a really important part of her kit.

Done251 votes

Her win rate is so low because people obsess with building her tanky and relying only on her Q poke. Come late game her damage drops like a rock due to the increasing MR values on bruisers who can and will happily squash her flat once they outlast her initial burst.

Terchio1 votes

Elise's current job in a teamfight is pretty boring. You stay in human form, stand behind the adc, and rely on your spells. If someone gets low and is isolated from the rest of the team and doesn't have any escapes left, you might be able to go into spider form and clean up a kill with your Q, but going into melee range before that point is usually an awful idea.

Just like Nidalee. Well, except that if you aren't actually trying to do damage with your spiders, you're doing it wrong anyways. She's niche for sure, but if you aren't using her spiderlings as part of her kit, it's not going to end well. Autoattack damage from her and her spiderlings are the heaviest forms of damage she has (even with the upcoming Q buff), and if you aren't forcing her to use them with high amounts of movement speed, Captain boots, or a slow from Mallet/Rylai's/Bilgewater/HextechGBlade/FrostQueen, then you are right, you won't be killing anything. She also becomes obscenely wispy with just a touch of movement speed anyways, as it opens new playing styles with her Rappel/Cocoon combo.

Cale0171 votes

See the issue here is that she doesn' tneed any spiderform buffs. She already has healing when her spiderlings attack something, she has automatic magic on hit damage with her own auto attacks, and slightly increased movement speed. If anything at all I wouldn't give her a shield, I'd make her immune to CC for a short duration after becoming spiderform (similar to how spiders can walk across any surface regardless of it's composition because they're interacting with it on a molecular level that goes beyond adhesion). Not a permanent thing, no one should be immune to all CC, but one could possibly make it a constant but have it work only on a smaller number of CC effects, i.e. she couldn't be slowed, snared, or knocked up/back although she could still be stunned, rooted, or feared. This also wouldn't apply to abilities like Ashe's, Anivia's, or Sejuani's as their slows, thematicaly, are from the effect of ice on a body which a spider would still be susceptible to. Failing this, perhaps an armor/MR buff would do her spider form some good, although not one that's quite at the level of Shyvana's buff in Dragon form since that still has to remain unique.

Her human form, though, could use some changes although I don't quite agree with all of it. In particular the spiders. The amount of spiders that you have remaining stay the same when going between her human and spider forms, even though they aren't being used in her human form. If they all do AoE damage or are expended to cause a slow in an area around her, she has to build up all of her spiderlings from scratch, up to 5 at max ult rank, meaning that before she can use her spider form's full damage potential again she's forced to stay in human form long enough to land 5 spells. This means that her spiderform's low cooldown is essentially useless as most players would need to wait for at least 3 or 4 spiders to really deal the kind of damage she needs during the late game. Waiting for all five gates full use of her ult by making her wait for at least two other skills to come off cooldown and hit an enemy. Should any of this skills miss, the wait before her ult is at it's full potential just gets longer. So it effectively goes from a 4 second cooldown to something similar to 8 or 9 seconds depending on how many spiders you want to use, up to possibly 12 seconds or so if you can land everything off the first try. The main focus of her kit is the interplay between her human and spider forms, having to wait for her human form to do anything more than land her basic three spells before using her ult inhibits that flow.

The only change I would make, if anything, to her spiders here is that if you want to use them offensively when she goes back to human form they automatically seek out and make one last attack at the nearest enemy to each of them, scattering like a swarm. They do a small amount of damage but cling to the targets, slowing them for a short time. This is something that would help her teamfight potential, giving her a mutiple target form of CC and some lesser single target damage that can affect multiple people, and incentivize her to stop and think about how many spiders she needs to use in her next spider form. This gives a meaningful choice instead of senselessly gating the full potential of her spider form, as if she waits to have all 5 spiders ready she can have full use of them when she turns spider and back to human if they all survive, or with however many are left. To balance out that she would be potentially waiting longer to use her spider form, let her spawn spiders based on a timer she moves around similar to Teemo's shrooms. Giving birth, so to speak. So every x number of seconds she spawns an extra spider ready for use in spider form next time she enters it, or if she's already in spiderform it spawns immediately.

Quort2 votes

"Not a permanent thing, no one should be immune to all CC, but one could possibly make it a constant but have it work only on a smaller number of CC effects, i.e. she couldn't be slowed, snared, or knocked up/back although she could still be stunned, rooted, or feared. This also wouldn't apply to abilities like Ashe's, Anivia's, or Sejuani's as their slows, thematicaly, are from the effect of ice on a body which a spider would still be susceptible to."

To be fair it would be pretty confusing if some spells worked and some didn't changing based on the character you're playing and the type of skill. Especially when skins are involved. Sejuani's Bear Cavalry stance wouldn't look icy so it might be confusing if it slowed; Rylai's Crystal Scepter applies an icy slow effect but would it apply? From a Clarity stand point I don't think that would be a good idea. Still, nice, thoughful post overall! :)

Cale0171 votes

{quoted}

"Not a permanent thing, no one should be immune to all CC, but one could possibly make it a constant but have it work only on a smaller number of CC effects, i.e. she couldn't be slowed, snared, or knocked up/back although she could still be stunned, rooted, or feared. This also wouldn't apply to abilities like Ashe's, Anivia's, or Sejuani's as their slows, thematicaly, are from the effect of ice on a body which a spider would still be susceptible to."

To be fair it would be pretty confusing if some spells worked and some didn't changing based on the character you're playing and the type of skill. Especially when skins are involved. Sejuani's Bear Cavalry stance wouldn't look icy so it might be confusing if it slowed; Rylai's Crystal Scepter applies an icy slow effect but would it apply? From a Clarity stand point I don't think that would be a good idea. Still, nice, thoughful post overall! :)

I wasn't making honest suggestions, because you're right. Clarity would become a massive issue. It was more just brainstorming. Adding in specialized effects based on the type of spell being used would start turning League into a generic RPG with elemental affinities and we can't have that lol

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