Shaco is in Dire Need of Bug Fixes and Changes

Hello everyone! My name is Desperate Shaco, i have been a shaco OTPsince season 5 in ranked, but have been playing Shaco ever since season 2, you could say i fell in love with this champion! A handful of high elo Shaco mains and I recently came together to discuss our beloved champion, because he has been in a very troublesome spot for a while now. Before i go over our conclusion on what to change, i wanted to give you a list of bugs that Shaco currently has, some of them are really problematic and happen almost every game, which causes a ton of frustration for a lot of Shaco mains. Here is the full list of all the Shaco bugs that we could think of:

• Not spawning at cursor after ult
• Clone not attacking after spawn, even when commanding him to do so
• Clone standing still after shacos death, even when enemies are in close range
• Boxes not prioritizing champions
• Being visible for a short while after q cast when having a dot on you (people will still get 1 auto attack off and see you for around 0.5s)
• Invis canceling when having cursor close to enemy when casting
• Clone not procing certain onhits like statikks/guinsoos
• E canceling its cast sometimes
• Certain runes/keystones not working with clone (PTA/Conq)
• Boxes not attacking inhibs/nexus sometimes
• Clone can only attack nexus/inhib when pressing alt+mb2 and not r
• Clone not attacking anything in general
• Backstabs being inconsistent on jungle monsters
• Not able to dodge damage/abilities (not invulnerable during r cast)
• Clone no backstab indicator anymore (intended?)
• Clone having stealth movement animation when ulting during q
• Tower always targeting shaco after utling when only he and clone are under tower, not whats closest (intended?)
• Attack move sometimes makes enemy follow you so they know which way you q'ed
• Since clone copies stats and items, things like hextech revolver are already on cd when clone spawns, so he cant proc it anymore
• Clone walking back to shaco for no reason short time after play input
• Clone dmg not counting towards total dmg at end of game screen
• Shaco box getting hit by skillshots while in stleath
• Box fear causes jungle camps to stay in a resetting state if they are used as the first initiation of combat (causes hp of camp to reset)
• Randomly spawning way too far away after ult, not even in direction of cursor WITH THE RECENT ADDITION OF 9.14:
• Shaco throws shiv with crit animation (visual bug) (/u/AsnenOfficial thanks)
• Shaco no longer has animation cancels ( deceive into recall, tp, e, tiamat no longer works and reveals you instantly)
• Backstab doesn't scale with CDR anymore, always stays at 3s no matter how much CDR (states that its always 3 sec, no matter how much cd) (thanks Darmausgang)
• Backstab angels are weird now and harder to hit

As you can see, there are a lot of bugs, most clone/ult bugs started happening around the time they introduced the new ult spawn mechanic and the Dark Star Shaco skin, other bugs have been in the game for several years!

Before I go over the changes, I wanna put some more emphasis on the bugs getting fixed, some really need to get fixed as soon as possible, others aren't that important, but I can't stress this enough. Having your clone just straight up refusing to play the game and just standing still doing nothing is not only frustrating but also makes you lose out on kills and will end up costing you your life.

Not actually spawning where your cursor is, is also a big issue, before this change, Shaco spawned at a random location, that was even worse and we are really thankful for that change because it allows us to reliably spawn on top of the enemy target we want to kill, but if you spawn somewhere else, out of auto attack range, away from the target, that is gonna cost you a free kill and potentially your life if your target has any form of cc that you would have evaded by killing them first.

Another huge issue is the invulnerability bug, this is one of the oldest mechanics and honestly one of the coolest as well, if you time Shaco's ultimate just right, it allows you to dodge anything in the game, with the exception of DoT effects, but as of recently, things like Karthus ult, tower shots, or zed ult and more have become undodgeable. This is obviously a huge deal, especially with the high presence of Karthus jungle in the last couple of patches, but also when tower diving. As Shaco it is really easy to tower dive once you hit lvl 6, you can tank the first couple of tower shots, then dodge one of the incoming tower shots as well as swap aggro to another ally, but because of this bug, you are not able to dodge the tower shot anymore, only break aggro.

Clone not being able to attack inhibitor or nexus when using the R key instead of alt + mb2 is not that big of a deal, pretty much every Shaco main knows it by now since it has been in the game for a while, non the less it would be a minor bug fix that would make a lot of Shaco mains that prefer using the R key happy. Clone not working with certain keystones/items is not a major problem, because of Shaco's play style, but since there is no reason for them not to work, why not just fix them and potentially open up some meta breaker play styles. Same goes to the hextech revolver bug, you will only have this item for a brief period of time anyways, because you are gonna upgrade it eventually, but depending on how long you have this item for, it will happen and will cost you a bit of damage.

Now the most interesting bug personally has to be where you get revealed after casting Q if you have your cursor close to the enemy champion. This is not the "bug" where you start your auto attack animation and then cancel it and get revealed for starting your auto attack. All you do is Q with your cursor close to a target and you get revealed. Luckily this bug rarely happens, it hasn't happened to me in a bit, but I've still seen it happen lately.

E canceling its cast is also very interesting, it seems like the shiv has a cast time and if during that cast time the enemy gets out of range or you lose vision the cast gets canceled. This might not necessarily be a bug, but it definitely is annoying if a low hp target gets away after you tried to throw your shiv 3 times chasing them but failed because it canceled every time. As I said, i'm not sure if that really is a bug, cause I've seen it happen with other abilities in the game, but it's something I just wanted to point out!

The thing about boxes not targeting inhibitors or the nexus is probably not a bug but rather a problem with the hit box of inhibitors and nexus, because if you put the box close enough, it does hit them, but if you put it slightly further away, the box won't trigger nor attack the inhib/nexus.

Something that makes every Shaco main rip out their hair is the backstabs being really inconsistent for jungle monsters. Sometimes you walk behind one of the mobs, but it doesn't proc a backstab even though the monsters model is clearly facing away from you, this gets especially tricky with raptors, they turn around really quickly compared to all the other camps, making it feel like RNG.

Shaco's clone had his own backstab indicator for a while, but it suddenly disappeared, I sadly don't remember what patch it was, but unless I missed it this either has to be a bug or and undocumented change.

Since Shaco has gotten his new walk animation there is a bug in the game where if you ult during stealth, your clone will keep the stealthed walk animation, while the real Shaco has the normal walk animation, this makes telling the clone apart a little easier and gives the enemy team a slight, unfair advantage.

This one is also very interesting, as far as my understanding goes, a tower will always target the closest champion when no minions or enemy champions are in range. For example, when you push a tower and your last minion dies, the tower will always attack the champion closest to the tower. But with Shaco that is not the case, the tower will always prioritize the real Shaco over the clone, even when the clone is closer to the tower. I am not sure if this is intended and just hasn't been documented or if the tower mechanic is different, but it sure has cost me a couple of deaths, nothing major though.

Bugs where champions follow you or can see you after your Q are very rare, especially the DoT bug has happened maybe 10 times to me in around the 4 years of playing Shaco, but when they happen they are really annoying, because they usually cause you to die. It's especially frustrating if you try to mind game the enemy team by Q'ing backwards or faking the jump over the wall.

Boxes getting hit by skill shots while being fully armed and invisible is something I personally haven't seen in my games, mainly because I rarely play lane Shaco, but someone showed me a clip of a Yasuo tornado hitting a fully charged and invisible box.

There is also a bug with boxes, I'm not sure how to explain that one, but for example blue buff takes damage from all the box's shots, then heals back a little bit of hp, and then just proceeds to take damage normally. The weird part here is the fact that blue buff heals back damage, as if it was resetting like when the aggro bar of a camp hits 0.

About box prioritization i don't know too much, i think boxes are supposed to prioritize champions over minions, but they fail to do so sometimes.

Now to the Shaco changes we would suggest:

• Changing E to magic or reverse adaptive damage
• Upping the base damage of E slightly
• Changing box arm time from 2s to 1.5s
• Upping box's health (AP scaling?)
• Changing invisibility duration from 1.5s - 4.5s to 3s - 4.5s
• Increasing the duration in which Shaco can proc his Q damage from 0.25s to 1s
• Changing the way the execution works on Shaco's E
• Slightly higher clone explosion range
• Higher clone explosion damage
• Change the clone AI
• Range indicator of max range where clone teleports back to Shaco

I can honestly only give vague numbers to all these changes and i really don't want Shaco to be overbuffed with damage, nor does anyone else, we want Shaco to be exclusive to us and not be a meta champion that is pick or ban. But i do think that he deserves some love in form of QoL changes and slight number tweaks.

Making E magic damage or even reverse adaptive damage would really help AD Shaco out, he currently has no magic damage in his kit. The magic damage Shaco does have in his kit is unusable for AD Shaco, since boxes don't deal any damage without AP and the clone explosion is unreliable and can't ever be procced in any of the assassination combos that AD Shaco uses anyways. This makes Shaco very susceptible to armor, every other assassin has some form of mixed damage like Kayn passive, or a armor/magic resist shred like Evelynn W. Shaco on the other hand has nothing like that.

Upping the base damage of E would really help Shaco's already very weak early game, his lvl 1 E is unable to kill the mini Krugs, this is very frustrating but easily fixable by upping his damage on each rank by 10.

The 2s arm time of boxes is slightly too long, people are usually able to just walk through boxes without getting feared, changing it to 1.5s would give him a little help in his early ganks, especially since Shaco hardly has any damage early on because of the low E base damage/scaling.

Increasing the box's health would definitely help Shaco to prevent champions like Riven one shotting the boxes with AOE abilities liker her Q. Making the health scale with AP would help out AP Shaco, which usually has a play style that revolves around his boxes anyways. This wouldn't give AD Shaco another box buff, because he doesn't really use them as a damage source anyways.

This is a big one, Shaco is forced to max E because of the very low base damage, without E max Shaco literally doesn't deal damage. The majority of mains get 2 or even 3 early points into Q, because the 1.5s stealth duration is laughable, even with boots, this doesn't get you anywhere, its basically a blink with almost no damage, but we don't really care about that on hit damage anyways. Changing the invisibility duration to 3s at rank 1 would allow Shaco to max E from the start without losing out on the invisibility duration that is absolutely crucial for ganking.

Upping the duration in which Shaco can proc his Q damage would be another really nice QoL change. Sometimes you cancel your auto attack and thus lose the little extra damage you get, but more importantly, you lose out on the 2.5s cooldown refund which make a huge difference between getting out or even back into the team fight.

Another big issues is the execute on Shaco's E, only if the enemy target is at 0HP Shaco can fully utilize the 50% damage increase. Almost every other execute in the game caps at a certain HP %. So all you are realistically gonna get out of the 50% is something like 40% and at that point the execute doesnt really matter anyways, because the target is gonna die to the base damage regardless of the execute.

This one is another QoL change, clone explosion is the most unreliable damage source in Shaco's kit, increasing its range from 250 to something like 325 would not guarantee a hit, but would reward good Shaco players with slightly more reliability on the explosion.

Changing the clone AI would be a dream come true, as mentioned above, the clone is really really buggy at the moment. I really don't know how hard it is to recode the entire AI, but i think something like Tibbers AI would work out pretty well.

A really cool trick as Shaco is to make your clone walk away from you, then Q into the enemy team and have your clone teleport back to you because he reaches the max range. This is one of the more advanced tricks to do, because you need to know the max range at which the clone teleports back to you, having a range indicator would definitely help people out, but not oversimplify things because you still have to manage the clone and Shaco at the same time to make this trick work.

For reference, the high elo Shaco mains mentioned in this thread and i held a podcast a week ago, a lot of the changes came from said podcast, if you wanna check it out, here is a youtube link: Podcast If you have any questions, feel free to ask, I would personally love to talk to a balance team member about this and hear their opinion about it!

TL:DR, Shaco is in a dire need of bug fixes, especially the ones revolving around clone and R, many of them are game breaking and cause a lot of frustration. I myself would personally be fine with all the bugs getting fixed for now, but i do think that Shaco deserves at least some love in terms of QoL changes and slight tweaks.

Im sorry for any errors in this post, this took me 3 hours to make and it is very late, but i really wanted to finish this up today!