Lets talk about Xayah

I know what everyone is expecting with this thread, "Xayah is op!", "Xayah should be nerfed", and "Xayah is broken". Quite the opposite in fact. Let's just take a look at her kit in general.

Clean cuts: After you use an ability, you fire feathers that deal 100% damage to your target and 50% damage to all other targets and leave a feather behind. This is what makes her great in teamfights, as it allows you to hit the adcs and mages in the backline through tanks. The piercing feathers do 50% of your autos, which means that your carries still have an opportunity to do damage while positioning around them. However this also requires you to either be hyper fed or have a strong frontline to keep the enemy tanks off of you, otherwise, your lack of movement(save for your W) means that you're easily going to die if you get CC'd and I'll mention the ult later on in the post.

Double Daggers: Xayah fires two feathers that deal 50% damage to all targets beyond the first. This is Xayahs Harass spell in lane with a relatively low cd and mana cost. However, this brings up two things, her feathers, and her damage scaling Scaling: All of Xayah's abilities save for her W scale off of bonus ad which means in the current meta-focused on winning the laning phase, she is at a serious disadvantage until late game, and has counters that allow her to be decimated in lane before she has an ability to win, namely the strongest adc currently, Lucian. While she CAN win the game, its like winning lane on Jhin if you take crit damage runes, it calls for skill on your champion and isn't guaranteed at all, and clearly doesn't happen more often than it does.

Feathers: The bread and butter of her kit, her feathers. They pierce targets and stay on the ground for 6 seconds, which is what you HAVE to play around when playing AS and AGAINST Xayah, much like a Lucian Q, you can dodge a Q auto E(instant root combo) and that several second downtime for you to punish her. Her E has a 4.8 second cd with 40% cdr and Q being at 3.6 and counting cast time, thats roughly 4 seconds before she can use that again. Accounting for the two seconds of invulnerability, then thats two seconds to CC and murder her, which is doable if you have the right team and coordination. There's also the point that her damage is mainly TEAM BASED. She has very little dueling potential, unless ahead, due to the need to set up feathers to do damage. So she's limited to teamfighting and kiting. In many ways, she could be a situational pick.

Deadly Plumage: Gives her an effect that adds 20% of her damage onto an auto, gives an AS steroid, and move speed for every auto. This is one of those things that brings the kit together without this she would be absolute garbage, and no, not that 20% extra ad on an auto. It's the movespeed and AS buff. For those of you who don't know, Xayah has the lowest possible base AS(save for cait) which is one reason why building runnanes and BORK isn't optimal. So having a 50% AS steroid at level 18 is important, it allows for her to kite and actually use her kit. Her kit is designed to be able to counter those who are chasing her since that's a Win-win situation for her. Not only does she do damage, she's able to setup feathers and annihilate a team. ****__

Bladecaller: Xayah call's back her feathers, doing reduced damage on specific targets and rooting if more than 3 feathers hit. Arguably, the ability that gives Xayah her identity, and the thing that most people think is op. Which it is clearly not. For one, she needs to set up feathers to be able to do damage or root. The root is for one second and is very short ranged, meaning she has to be near the target to be able to anything. The damage is based on the amount of feathers, which, once again, need to be setup so she can't just end a teamfight instantly AND they do reduced damage for every feather hit. The scaling is what balances this ability out the most. The scaling is .6 of her bonus ad and increased by .5% for every 1% crit chance Once again, bonus ad, and the crit chance bonus. She is literally meant to build crit chance due to the bonus ad scaling and the bonus damage for crit. Enforcing the weaker lane phase, which is the time when she's most exploitable. To counter her, just pick lane bullies and deny her farm, play around her feathers so she can't poke you down and root you, and she's useless for the rest of the game. BOOM. YOU WIN.

Featherstorm:

After a short delay, Xayah leaps into the air and leaving a line of feathers behind

This is the ability that makes her untargetable for two seconds, yes two seconds(I think this should be 1 second, personally, I'll concede that) and sets up feathers. What I didn't include in the description, was the cooldown. The cooldown without cdr is 140/125/110. The cooldown is REALLY long. Even if you build 40% cdr, that's 66 seconds for 2 seconds of untargetabilty. That leaves a HUGE window to take advantage of, and if you go the bork rush build, then you have very little cdr to reduce this cd, meaning that there's an even larger window. In teamfights, this allows Xayah to setup a root for most of the team so long as she lays feathers down before ulting, but again, using this ult offensively means you can't abuse the untergetabilty, but if you use it defensivly, then it might not be the best time to setup features or do the flat damage, which isn't amazing btw, on the entire team. It's a tradeoff, which is one thing riot is working for in champions, and it's definitely present is Xayah.

Time to bring in winrates:

The one thing I hate to bring up the most, would be winrates. If you take the time to look at the winrate of Xayah, it is almost universally less than 50%. In almost all Elos. At the momet of righting this post, her winrates sit at: Masters+: 41% Diamond: 49% Plat: 47% Gold: 47% Silver: 47% Bronze: 50%

Notice the one thing that stands out to me? Her winrate is highest against those who don't know her weaknesses and can play against her, Bronze. However if you look at her Ban rate, it's sitting at almost the same, if not HIGHER than her winrate. That's the entire point of this post, aside from trying to break the stigma that Xayah is op. Please, stop calling Xayah op every time she two shots your team because you didn't play against her feathers in lane and she got fed off of your poor asses in the bot lane, please stop banning her, and use your brain instead of thinking "Hey, it's a new champion, she must be op, BAN HER!". You're never going to be able to learn how to PLAY her or play AGAINST her when she's finally not banned constantly. If you want to focus on an op champ, just look at Lucian, he has a much higher playrate and winrate.

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