Because of the Way Corki Scales, There is Just No Good Item For Him ATM

So probably everybody knows by now that Corki just isn't as good as he once was anymore. Even before the Trinity Force changes, he had a winrate that is below average but the changes just kicked him over the edge.

The thing that really made me curious is that the other supposed victims of the changes did have working alternative builds. Gangplank winrate was unaffected because of the alternative Penplank build while Yasuo even ironically profited from the whole thing and now has the bruiser build available to him.

Corki on the other hand has no alternative builds and is now sitting at a 46% winrate. The question I want to investigate with this thread is why exactly this is the case and why he doesn't scale with items that well right now. At the end I want to give some suggestions on how I would fix the problems he has, though that is really just for fun and specualation.

So the first scaling problem he has is cooldown reduction (CDR). He surely is an ability caster with his Q, E, Ult and his package but the spell he makes use of the most , his ultimate, does not profit from CDR. This is because it is based off an ammo system that gives you a rocket every few seconds and has a static cooldown of 2 seconds. Because of that, he doesn't profit from the CDR of items that are thought to be core items of him right now, namely Essence Reaver and the current incarnation of Tri-Force.

The next problem he has is that he does not profit from the armor penetration that usual AD caster items give as good as his fellow spellcaster marksmen like Lucian, Jhin and MF. All of them are building armor penetration builds right now because their damage is mostly physical while Corki's damage is mostly magical. Some might argue that even Corki deals a bit of physical damage but looking at the graphs he deals even less than you might think.

Only 21,3% of Corki's total average damage dealt per game is physical, 77,2% is magical and the rest true damage from red. Compare that to Lucian, another spellcaster champion whose damage is 92,7% physical with the rest of his damage being from his W and red.

He could in theory go AP to get access to magic penetration but his scaling just isn't as good as it is with AD. On top of that his autos are much weaker with this build and he does not have access to his ultimate DPS pre level 6, which makes a tremendous difference in lane.

So what he's stuck with is the crit build, but being a spellcaster marskman he just doesn't profit as much from it as an autohitting marksman like Twitch or Tristana would.

To fix all these problems Riot gave him several buffs over the last few patches. But in my opinion all of them didn't adress the core problems he has right now. It also didn't change his winrate.

The late game AD ratio buff on his ult that he has received in 6.11 wasn't all that necessary because his AD ratios are actually already top notch. The problem is that all the AD items he has access to have secondary stats that he just won't make as much use of as other champions do, like pointed out above.

His E base damage and tick rate plus the cooldown on his W and package have been lowered too, and while these buffs are definitely nice they did not spike his winrate either.

So what needs to be done? Here are 3 of my ideas. I'm not a game designer so take it with a grain of salt.

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1: Make His Ultimate Scale With CDR: I'm not talking about the 2 second static cooldown of his ultimate because it would not change as much because it is really limited by the stack generation that would stay the same.

So I'm proposing that instead, CDR would lower the time it takes to generate new stacks.

I copied the concept from Teemo's ultimate, which also has an ammo system and it also works with CDR which really helps with his build. Imagine how much less valuable Nashor's Tooth and Morello's would be on him without that.

Of course, those two abilities are very different from each other but if it works on Teemo why wouldn't it work on Corki too?

This would allow Corki to have a better synergy with Tri-Force or an Essence Reaver crit-build.

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2: Make His Passive Turn Armor Pen Into Magic Pen: Or what I would like even more is that it's not turned into magic pen, but the magic pen would just be added and the other way around. So Sorcerer's Boots would give an extra 15 armor pen and Youmuu's For example would give you 20 magic pen on top of the physical pen.

Giving him so much free stats might sound scary but it also works with Yasuo's passive and even with it he doesn't build crit anyway. Plus, you must look at it this way: A Youmuu's on Lucian synergizes with 92.7% of his damage while it would synergize with 98.5% of Corki's damage, so the difference is not as big as you would think at first.

This way he would have a really nice penetration build available to him - Sorc Boots, into Youmuu's, Duskblade and other penetration items.

EDIT:

I also just realized that this would make killing tanks much easier for him when he buys Van Dominik's or Mortal Reminer. I never saw a Corki in his current situation ever get into the late game anyway but I imagine that he would struggle with that.

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3: Buff His AP Ratios: Even with Hybrid Items like Guinsoo's and Gunblade being around, Corki does not seem to profit from them all that much. His AP ratios are okay, but not good.

This would allow him to be the first ever hybrid marksmen which would definitely be pretty interesting.

But this is also the change I like the least of the 3. It would have the danger of making pure AP mage builds better on him than a Marksman build and that is not what Corki is supposed to do.

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I also got to mention that there is a danger of all of these 3 changes or only 1 or 2 of them being too much and making Corki OP for a few patches. But even so I think that something has to be done to adress to problem , becase the current buffs really don't and we can't just let him sit at a 46% winrate.

Let me know what you guys think.