Two Changes I Would Like to See Made to Ekko

tl;dr: make W's stun duration scale with rank and lower the damage on passive. If you are going to leave a comment, please read my argument.

Hello!

I am uofmman67, and I have played about half a dozen games as Ekko on the PBE. Currently, I think I have a pretty good understanding of the basics of his kit. I believe Ekko to be pretty well balanced; that being said, however, there are two issues that I have with his current kit.

1: Parallel Convergence (W)'s stun duration should scale with skill rank. Why? A 2.25 second long AOE stun at rank 1 is far too powerful. The skill may have a 3 second windup time, but the enemy only sees the last 0.5 seconds of the cast. That allows for Ekko to catch his opponents by surprise with good skill timing and placement (e.g. making sure the batter is out of sight), just like every other skillshot in the game.

Only one other champion that I can think of has a non-ultimate form of hard CC that lasts longer than 2 seconds at rank 1. Sion's Q, when fully charged, will knock up enemies for 2.25 seconds. Unlike Ekko's W, enemies can always see Sion charge up Q when he has not broken line of sight. The only champion whose rank 1 ultimate skill has hard CC lasting for more than two seconds is Malzahar. If you know of a spell that I missed, please comment down below.

One possible set of duration times could be 1.25 / 1.5 / 1.75 / 2 / 2.25 seconds. Scaling the stun duration with rank gives jungle Ekko some incentive to level that skill to increase gank effectiveness and jungle sustain while reducing lane Ekko's early damage and his insane cheese potential.

2: The damage dealt by Z-Drive Resonance (passive), particularly the AP ratio, should be reduced. It is not particularly challenging to proc Ekko's passive as Q is able to add up to two stacks and E also applies a stack. Here is a scenario:

Ekko has 500 AP at level 16 with and an enemy has two stacks of Ekko's passive. If Ekko were to use E on the enemy, it would deal 1122 damage before resistances, slow the target by 80% for 3 seconds, and give Ekko an 80% movespeed buff for 3 seconds. As soon as the slow wears off, Ekko can immediately begin to stack his passive again. That's a late mid game Veigar ult on a potential 4.2 second cooldown! This is especially worrying because glass cannon Ekko will end up with much more than 500 AP.

Breaking down the damage by parts yields this: Passive: 551 damage Lich Bane: 301 damage Phase Dive: 270 damage

The re-proc timer could also be increased: however, I think this hinders AP bruiser Ekko more than glass cannon Ekko because bruiser Ekko deals significantly less damage than glass cannon Ekko. Increasing the re-proc timer leaves glass cannon's instant damage output unchanged, which is the issue addressed in the above scenario. Conclusion: Reducing passive's AP ratio (perhaps by half) and not increasing the re-proc timer would reduce glass cannon Ekko's insane damage while not greatly affecting bruiser Ekko.

Obviously these numbers are just to prove my point and have not been tested. As such, use the general trend I describe versus specific numbers. If you have any specific numbers you think would work, feel free to leave a comment.

Thank you for taking the time to read my two cents on Ekko. As always, discussion is encouraged!