Shaco nerfs, and overall thoughts on Shaco in current meta.
Dear Riot, I would be pleased if you were to ever respond to this blog. Now to start off with my opinions of your nerf. 1.Nerf is hitting both AP, AD,Tank,Bruiser and even Hybrid Shaco. First off all removing 100+ dmg and extending cooldown is always a big nerf. Now the problem here is that some Shaco playstyles are ok, not Op and i am safe to assume even bad in some cases. Hitting certain roles like Top Shaco because Tank JG shaco/Lethality Shaco is busted is not OK. 2.You are supporting the infamous tank Shaco that lategame pops ult and creates a tank out of nowhere, if nothing now that the assasin has less dmg, tank will get more popular and we wont see any difference in Winrate in few weeks, as tank which is more op then the assasin will start rising even more. 3. Shaco rework came with a big problem. If you check your data you will see Shaco is doing MAGIC DMG. To the point that I build Titanic,MoM,Trinity and i still have more magic dmg then physical one. This is a problem because most people expect that they need to build armor to counter Shaco and this is causing players that just got destroyed by Shaco to buy armor expecting him to be AD. But no. He is like a Corki now. Damage is split and players cant really counter it no matter what you buy. And buying armor just helps him snowball more. 4. Shaco has seen rise as some of his natural enemies got nerfed. Now i am not saying this is bad XD but jungle diversity does seem to have gone down. I am sure that once few junglers get off their leash Shaco will slowly fall into the niche again. 5. He is by no means OP, he simply has the abbility to punish enemies severly for their mistakes. This can sometimes be unhealthy but many players like this playstyle. 6. Shaco has transfered from earlygame to lategame. Now this is enigma for myself also but i think his current boxes and Q mechanics led to this. Now what would happen when you nerfed Q that led to this? I am afraid we will be left with a champ that has no powerspikes which is severely bad decision. So here is my proposal. Instead of killing off just 1 abbility do this. Transfer E into physical dmg if Shaco has more AD then AP(this should help out a lot. Nerf the base dmg of the boxes, but increase scaling to balance it out. Just slightly nerf R duration. Finaly make passive start from 110% and then go to 150%.
As you can see all of these changes are nerfs to tank shaco while doing minimal dmg to assasin shaco playstyles. Transfering E dmg to physical should nicely nerf tank Shaco and help assasin playstyle. Less duration on ult means tanko cant pop a secondary tank in midfle of teamfight. Also killing the earlygame of tank shaco by lowering passive dmg but boosting the lategame of real assasins should help his core identity. Also lets not forget AP Shaco which just got stronger boxes to help him farm. I think this should be overall better direction for Shaco changes.
