@Riot. My opinion of why hexdrinker is bad for midlane.

I feel like Hexdrinker is warping midlane play in favor of AD assassins and creating a huge power difference in midlane mage scaling compared to AD assassin scaling. I will try to keep my thoughts short and concise as well as being clear about what I am trying to say.

Hexdrinker Pros, Allows for AD assassins to have an item to buy to survive against rough matchups. Maw is very good at what it does. (probably too good imo)

Cons, I feel like the power spike on the item is too early. (pre level six) I feel like there are some design problems with the upgraded Maw.

Lets face it sometimes as an ad assassin you get counterpicked or you lose lane and you need to be able to buy some kind of defense while maintaining some sort of offence to stay relevent in the game, as well as not feed your lane opponent. These are the reasons I feel like hexdrinker is too good of an item to fill this role. Comparing it to the mage counterpart in seekers armguard. Base gold efficiancy for both items, taken from LOL wiki. Hexdrinker sits at 102 gold efficiency upon completion, with a staggering 159 if the shield gets popped. Seekers sits at a measly 89 gold efficiency upon completion, while it takes 11 minions to reach 100%, and caps out at 139 with 30 minion kills. As a person who abuses hexdrinker you can almost 100% realiably complete this item at level 5. While the mages going for the same defense complete seekers at the same time. This creates a huge power deficit for mages because they are coming back to lane with less "gold efficiency" in their pocket by far as well as having to come close to matching it must first wait to farm 30 more minions. which at 100% last hitting success takes at least 2 1/2 minutes. this allows for the ad assassin to basically win lane due to items. Also the build path is easier for ads because they can start longsword and 3 pots to reduce the cost at level 5 to 950 while most mages need to start dorans for the mana regen.

I feel like there are two easy fixes for this problem

1. remove the lifeline passive from hexdrinker and put it on a stacking mechanic to match the worth of seekers. (maybe 10 attack damage and 10 MR gaining .5 attack damage per stack and 1 mr per stack capping at 30 stacks)
2. Remove the attack damage from hexdrinker but keep the active. reduce the cost to 1200 gold. and have it a purely defensive item.

Both of these suggestions reduce the talon/zeds ablitiy to eat an entire kit from a mage. survive and counter all in and walk away with the kill. It also adds risk to rushing hexdrinker because you wont be as strong early.

Side note, can we please have maw build out of caufields warhammer instead of serrated dirk and gain 10% cdr instead of 10 armor pen. I for one believe very strongly that armor pen doesnt belong on a defensive item. its counter intuitive.

Thanks for reading, feedback is appreciated. Lasie H Shawl

TLDR reduce the effectiveness in hexdrinker for the all important level six power spike and smooth the power curve to be more in line with its ap counterpart.