Just wanted to hear others thoughts on kassadin's viability as a mid laner or mage in general. I personally miss the days when he was the anti mage (Q used to silence) and now he has a weak spell shield that very rarely results in a winning trade due to the slow missle speed when laning against other mages. Although he was reworked pretty recently I believe he needs some looking into to renew his viability.
Considering the Spell shield appears as soon as the ability is cast, the missile speed doesn't personally effect me very much.
I've been playing him fairly regularly as of late, and playing smart I still feel pretty stompy moving into mid and late game. It's just about playing carefully in lane and not picking him in circumstances where his abilities would be ineffective. I don't pick him all the time as he is best as a counter pick (in my opinion), but I still have fun with him and feel effective when I do pick him.
Kassadin's biggest problem is that he cannot be an assassin while having the amount of mobility currently in his kit. If he is balanced around being able to assassinate a target, then he is far too safe and gating him with mana and weak laning is never going to be enough to counteract that until forcing him into non-viability. They need to push him into the role of an anti-mage skirmishing DPS champ.
To do this they need to:
Lower his burst across the board (in some places pretty substantially)
Lower his cooldowns (in the case of his E, remove the base cooldown and run off of the spell charges only)
Increase his durability (both through his passive magic resistance and the strength/duration/uptime of his shield)
Lower his mana costs (especially his ultimate, because once they fix his gameplay he won't need to be shackled by mana as severely)
If they do this, he'll be more focused around popping into fights, landing a few spells, jumping out, and overall being a slippery DPS champ. He won't be able to insta-kill anyone, but he'll be more effective overall while being healthier for the game and easier to balance.
ya he needs something done. I find He's just too weak
his shield is really dumb thing. other champs have general shields that block all damage. meanwhile. in the gimmick of being an anti mage his shield only blocks magic damage? wut?. why doesn't it block all damage and idk. the shield is doubled against magic damage? that would make sense. and the 15% magic reduction is fairly. stupid after everyone gets a cpl items. should scale up. starts at 10%. and at level 18 goes up to 25%. and his base MR is the lower end of the game at 30. makes no sense
