My problems with Ivern (and possible solutions)

Our newest champion has been added to the rift and so far the only thing I have seen is a grey screen.

Sure, Ivern can be said to have a good amount of utility and fast clear times however when you look into his kit deeper you find there are many flaws. I will go down the list of problems with each of his spells individually and give my insight on how each ability can be fixed in order to, in my opinion, better balance him as a champion overall.

First off, Ivern's Passive, Friend of the Forest, gives him crazy strong clear as he can, with smite, instantly "free" any non-epic jungle camp giving him gold, experience, and past level 5, a second buff for an ally champion. In theory this ability sounds extremely overpowered... until you find that it costs ~200+ health for every camp that is marked. This is insane as most junglers currently played don't lose anywhere near this much health per camp, especially when clearing a monster like scuttlecrab. This puts Ivern at an insanely big health deficit making it nearly impossible to gank after clearing even the first 3 jungle camps. This also leaves him extremely open to counter jungling, champions like would have a hay day abusing this. My proposal on fixing this would really be to just lower the health cost that it takes to use his passive as 200 health loss is crazy when his health pool is barely 600 at level 1.

Ivern's Q, Rootcaller, roots an enemy in place for 1.2 / 1.4 / 1.6 / 1.8 / 2 seconds, dealing 80 / 125 / 170 / 215 / 260 (+ 70% AP) magic damage and allowing for any ally champion or Daisy to dash to the rooted target, placing themselves at their attack range from the target. This spell can be one of the best but also one of the most troll spells in the game as leading your entire team into a rooted Illaoi has haunted me in many nightmares since Ivern's release

The root is a nice duration, maxing at at 2 seconds however the damage scaling is very weak. Even building full AP it doesn't do anywhere near as much damage as most other "support" champs that can buy one or two AP items and still do a lot of damage (biggest example I can see is Karma or Sona who can fully one shot ADCs or mids with a single spell rotation). The way I can see this being fixed is buy slightly increasing the scaling to maybe 80 / 130 / 180 / 230 / 280 magic damage or lowering the cooldown scaling from 16 / 15 / 14 / 13 / 12 seconds to 16 / 14 / 12 / 10 / 8 seconds.

Ivern's W, Brushmaker, is probably my least favorite ability of his. In my opinion, the damage for his auto attacks is way too weak and the brush is very inconsistent in placement and effectiveness. Currently the damage it gives on hit is 20 / 30 / 40 / 50 / 60 (+ 30% AP) magic damage and the range bonus. Because of enemy natural resistances, this damage ends up feeling much lower than the ability states. However, this issue is not too bad to fix as I think just having the percent AP from items increase from 30% AP to 40% AP would be more than enough to make it more viable.

The active ability on the other hand could use a little bit of work. The best aspects of this ability is that it gives great vision with a decent cast range. But that is pretty much all it has. Since Ivern is very reliant on being a jungler or, in some extreme circumstances, a support with a useless passive in lane, This ability's effectiveness is lost for ganking as a bush slowly creeping up from the river is very obvious for most laners to notice. So, using it to gank is possible but very difficult. One great and common use of the brush is to help with pushing and sieging however what I have found is that as an ally Ivern, the brush is placed in a way to keep in range of the tower and allow for harass and annoyance towards the enemy team from all members of the team but once the minions are dead, if the siege was unsuccessful, the enemies can push up into the brush and now there are 5 enemies hidden in the brush with a tower to back them up in case of a fight breaking out. It creates a much larger disadvantage than the advantage that it possibly created moments before. I think that Ivern's brush should work similar to a Rek' Sai tunnel.

Let me explain. I think that the brush should be destoryed if an enemy champion stands within the brush for 0.5 seconds as long as there are no ally champions within that brush. This would mean that the enemies could deny Ivern or vision/situation control by stepping up and destroying the brush however they would take a risk of entering a brush filled with enemy champions. This would keep Ivern's brushmaker as a good zoning tool but still keeping it balanced by allowing the enemy to break the brush and deny Ivern of his zoning.

Ivern's E, Triggerseed, is his best ability in my opinion as it delivers a small stat of tankiness with his AP based shield, a very good slow at 70% for 3 seconds, and an average amount of damage for a shield type ability. I see this ability similar to Diana's W, Pale Cascade, as it gives some damage and good shield as well. Nothing is wrong with this ability and I do not think it needs any fixing.

Ivern's R, Daisy!, summons a tibbers-like rock golem that is controllable, can deal damage, and provide crowd control against enemies. The good thing about this rock golem is that she has a great movespeed of 419 for the early game (plus the 25% bonus for 5 seconds after summoning), allowing for fairly straightforward early tower dives. This coupled with the blocking potential it has against skillshots, it isn't too bad but when it comes to the late game, the movespeed is near very underwhelming, allowing even some of the slowest moving champions to be able to kite her, and Daisy dies too quickly. Smite takes care of about 1/3 of its HP throughout the game (adjusted for level scaling of both enemies and allies) so if the enemy jungler chooses to burst Daisy down with 3 or 4 spells, it isn't impossible at all.

Daisy's ability, Flower Power, is an melee queued spell where after 3 melee attacks, Daisy will do a type of mini Braum ult and knock up enemy units in a short area. The issue with this is that the animation to channel the spell is extremely animated and the actual spell's travel time is way too slow that by late game it is easily avoidable.

When Annie dies her giant plush tibbers runs like a mad bear (?) chasing after any nearby champion and smacking them down with the force of multiple tornadoes. Unfortunately the rock hard golem sort of falls over with Ivern which happens very often since usually Ivern is built as AP or Support items instead of tank. I think that similar to tibbers, Daisy should also stay alive with a draining duration to attack any nearby champions as well. (It would be cool to see Daisy gain the damage and slow proc off of Ivern's E, Triggerseed, and it pop upon Daisy's death).

I think changes for this could include decreasing the animation time and travel time on Daisy's Flower Power, and increasing Daisy's resistances. Also, having Daisy's movespeed scale with level to be 419/ 429 / 439 at levels 6 / 11 / 16 would be good as well.

Concluding Thoughts: Ivern is fairly weak in our current meta with no damage whatsoever when building tank items and no tankiness at all when building damage items (which is pretty awkward for a champion who's kit is made to go in-in-in). Ivern's abilities all need a bit of tweaking in order to stay effective throughout the entirety of the game. His concept is cool, just not effective in the long run.

Any and all opinions I made for his ability changes are ideas that could help him. I'm open to hear any opinions that others have to offer on his kit and any changes that could be made.

Thank you for reading all of this, I apologize for any mistakes grammatically and spelling wise,

Psyklone