The Problem With Pyke

I think that since it's been about 3 weeks since Pyke's release and that he's still sitting at the worst winrate in two separate roles it's pretty safe to say the champion isn't all that great. Fortunately there's a good reason why and it's something that Riot, along with ourselves, can learn from.

Pyke is an assassin, more over he's a nerfed one, as they stated they gave him a lot of tools to play as a support and because of that he has his passive that prevents him from building any HP so he can't end up like Ekko or Fizz. But that's actually part of the problem with him in Support, he has plenty of CC but no way to survive going in to use it, his passive is really helpful after your done fighting, mostly to recover from failed engages buuuuut assassins don't really play that way and the Support role is full of champions that hard counter assassins.

Supports that Hard Counter Assassins:

Infact most Supports counter assassins, because their supposed to, so what your telling me is that Pyke was designed to constantly be at a disadvantage in the support role, even if his ultimate is really good and is DEFINITELY strong enough to get everyone else on your team fed during mid game with just a few picks and roams, it's not good enough to save him from his entire kit being countered by one spell from 90% of the botlaner's in the game.

In jungle despite having a kit that's almost perfect for ganking, his clear is downright crap and it takes a lot to make him work there, the main reason being his Cooldowns are atrociously long early in the game, this was done to mimic other strong catcher's in botlane such as Thresh, so that the enemy can play against it buuuut as we can clearly see, despite support being his best role, he'll never have a good time there unless he's buffed into being OP. So why not make him a jungler? In Riot Meddler's words.

"We purposely made it hard to play him in other roles out of fear for him being too strong." what this translates to is that, he's an assassin that was made to support, but can't because of how the Support and Assassin dynamic works against him and that because of EXP sharing in botlane he can't get ahead like an assassin usually has to unless in those extreme situations where you just dominate in lane phase, but even then, he's still a support if that happens and won't have enough gold to even afford a duskblade most of the time.

TLDR: I think we can kind of assume pyke will never truely work as a support since he's going to constantly be fighting things that counter him, but in the jungle if he got a lower cooldown on his shortcasted Q he'd probably be fine there and it would make a nice home for him. What we can learn from this is not to try and pigeon hole a certain class of champion into a role that doesn't fit the playstyle and puts them at a constant disadvantage. (assassins though are really the only class this applies to. Pigeon holing doesn't work for them because they have obvious weaknesses and obvious strengths, most of them atleast, and it usually results in them having trouble in any role that they have to constantly deal with those weaknesses, if you remove those weaknesses then you make them OP.)