Kennen feedback from a master teir Kennen main

Many who read this post probably won't know who I am, but for the few that do, you know that I have played a LOT of Kennen games (getting pretty close to 2000 now) since season 3, and while I still have a lot of room for improvement in my mastery of Kennen, and my playstyle in general, I was able to gain a solid grasp of Kennen's strengths and weaknesses over the past few years. In this post I will summarize the problems and possible solutions to Kennen's kit, which will hopefully be taken into consideration if a red just so happens to pass through.

My primary concern with Kennen is that he is far too reliant on the flash summoner. If you pick Kennen in champion select, your only plausible option is to select flash as one of your summoners or you are hindering yourself to such an extreme extent that you would be nothing more than useless in the mid-endgame. While flash gives other champions a slight 'boost' in their kit's effectiveness, it is an absolute necessity on Kennen that provides him with quite a large amount of power. The problem with this is that enemies can also just flash away or use another means of mobility/disruption (dash/teleport/KNOCKBACK) to completely nullify his only means of landing a great ultimate, leaving the Kennen player powerless for the next few minutes, which brings me to my next point.

!PLEASE RIOT! Rework Kennen's E!

Kennen's E is the gateway to making him a viable champion. Many will argue that his Q needs to travel through creeps with reduced damage, do aoe damage, or anything to make it a viable poke tool equivalent to that of ANY other mage, or that his W needs better scaling, since the base damage is already so low (185 at rank 5 with .55 scaling), but I firmly believe that the only way to make Kennen truly viable is to completely rework his Lightning Rush.

Currently, Lightning Rush is as showed:

Active: For 3 seconds Kennens base movement speed is increased by 310. He also gains the ability to pass through units, dealing magic damage to all enemy units in the process, restoring 40 energy from the first enemy he hits. This ability only deals 50% damage to minions. Additionally, for 4 seconds Kennens armor and magic resistance are increased.While Lightning Rush is active, he can activate it again, to cancel the first part of the ability.

Cost: 100/95/90/85/80 energy Cooldown: 10/9/8/7/6 seconds Magic Damage: 85/125/165/205/245 (+0.6 per ability power) Armor and Magic Resistance Bonus: 10/20/30/40/50

The current lightning rush has many problems. Firstly, It's too damn slow! If you try to play Kennen mid lane against other mage and you decide to rush your enemy with your E, you'll take so much harass before you're even able reach them, forcing you to use your E completely defensively or to simply reposition yourself. The amount of time it takes for you to reach your opponent in any scenario is so long that they have such an immense amount of time to plan and react to your engage.

Secondly, the defensive portion on Lightning rush is inadequate. At rank 5 it provides 50 armor and magic resist, roughly around ~1500 gold worth of stats for 4 seconds, but when a Kennen wants to maximize damage (by building zhonias/deathcap/abyssal/voidstaff) it leaves very little room for effective health. For those of you who may or may not know, simply stacking defensive stats without any health is rather ineffective.

Lastly, The ability does 50% less damage to minions. Why... Honestly, Why! There's absolutely no reason for this ability, which requires you to put yourself into such a dangerous position as a squishy mage to do 50% less damage to minions. Many mages can waveclear with one ability (or at least kill the caster creeps in one move) at lvl 9, whereas Kennen has a hard time clearing the back wave with his E and W combined (even with W at rank 5).

Possible Solutions:

• Make the ability do full damage to minions. This is a bare minimum plead.

• Change the defensive portion on the ability to grant a shield instead of bonus Armor/MR. A shield will grant Kennen the effective health he needs when building essential items such as Zhonias Hourglass and Abyssal Scepter.

• Rework the mobility on Lightning Rush.

  • Give it more movement speed, shorter duration

• Change the ability to work like Vi's Q, a charging dash that explodes on arrival and grants a decaying movement speed buff on full charge.
• Grant stacking movement speed depending on the amount of champions/minions (friendly and enemy) you have traveled through.
• Grant a blink upon player deactivation, rapidly decreasing in distance based on how long the ability has been active for. (give it an indicator similar to varus Q, but reversed)