Ways to Make Illaoi's Kit Balancable @RiotScruffy, I'm curious if you have thoughts

TLDR: Illaoi's damage can't be balanced across champion matchups, or even across elo's because the Illaoi player can't do much to ensure it hits.

I play a lot of Illaoi and what I think the most unsatisfying thing about playing her is that, often, I feel as if when I do well, I don't outplay my opponent, they only outplay themselves.

Usually, we as members of the community can arrive at a consensus as to what the skill floor and skill ceiling of a champion is. The things that differentiate a good Riven from a bad one, or a good Lee Sin from a bad one, are all clear exhibitions of the player's mastery of the champion's mechanics. How fluidly do they cancel animations? When given the opportunity to trade, how close were they to the optimal damage their champion can do? How well do they know their champion's damage output? A player's skill with a champion should increase the chance for Victory, that assumption is what the entire ranked system is based on.

With Illaoi, I feel as if my experience with the champion does not increase the likelihood that I will win a game as much as if I were playing another champion. The reason for this is that, as a person that understands very well where Illaoi's damage comes from, I know that almost none of it can be guaranteed to land.

If you flash onto a flashless opponent with Riven, you can understand exactly how much damage you can do to them with the mobility that you have. With Graves as strong as he is now, almost every one in the game knows that at level 12 he has easily 450-600 damage of burst to lay down on you, and that's something that the Graves can know and you can know in playing against him.

With Illaoi, neither the Illaoi player nor the opponent can know how much damage she is going to do in a trade, because her potential damage is astronomical, but her realized damage is often very low and little is left to the Illaoi player to hedge her bets. This is because 90% of her damage is dodgeable, and the rest of it is interruptable. The only damage that you can begin to rely on playing Illaoi is Harsh Lesson, 110% if your AD, and up to 100 bonus damage. The problem with needing to rely on Harsh Lesson for damage into high mobility opponents is that It's balanced to deal a very small amount of Illaoi's damage, As in an ideal scenario, a massive tentacle whomps down for 500 damage shortly after it. But when that tentacle is MIA, or dodged, the W on-hit can't begin to stand up with a gragas WE or a couple of Shyvana auto attacks, or god forbid, Irelia pressing all the buttons.

So, what I'm trying to communicate that balancing a champion without reliable damage is an uphill battle that Riot shouldn't be fighting. Illaoi needs a way to reliable not just damage but kill opposing champions who have a mobility spell, or their flash up.

So, Illaoi doesn't need buffs per se, but what she does need is a play pattern in which the majority of her damage isn't contingent on her opponent being unskilled or immobile. So, the upcoming suggestions all come with a decrease in unreliable damage, in favor of damage that both players can assume to land.

Some suggestions that I have that could integrate reliability into the CC less Kraken Preistess's kit are as follows:

1. Move damage from tentacles to Harsh Lesson: Add hp scaling to it, or swap the on hit to % enemy max HP, or even make it an execute, so players are rewarded for flashing onto enemies with it. OR
2. Make Harsh Lesson do more (or frequent) tentacle damage: 3 different options: A) make it so that champions hit with W take more damage when hit by tentacles. This makes a W Q combo when no tentacles are around meaningful. or B) make it so that W creates a new, less dodgeable tentacle attack. Maybe it extends the range on nearby tentacles, or makes tentacles "splash," increasing their AOE. C) Change how the spell functions. Currently Harsh Lesson can be interrupted by literally any interrupt beyond a slow, since it is both an on hit effect and a mobility spell. Something that could make the spell more reliable is to make the tentacle smash effect always occur if she begins her auto attack. This would keep true immobilizers from proccing tentacles, but still make a dodgeable tentacle come down if a stun cancels her buffed up attack. OR
3. Give Illaoi access to more tentacles: I know this issue is definitely being tackled at the moment, but Illaoi's kit works is so lacking when she has no ambient tentacles around. The need for your ultimate to be up to do relevant damage makes her one of the weakest skirmishing juggernauts in the game. But, too many tentacles would be oppressive, and already, there's an interaction where if a tentacle is killed and Illaoi has one in inventory, the enemy player is unrewarded for killing the tentacle, as a new one will immediately spawn in its place. Tentacles need a cooldown for every location, as well as some way to choose where they spawn. There's nothing worse than recalling for items only for your tentacle to spawn on gromp and walk into lane with a 17 second passive cooldown. The simplest way to do this is to give them an ammo system and, make the spawn radius to Illaoi smaller than the tentacle range, so she can safely walk down lane without spawing them, and choose to place them in places in lane by walking to a wall. OR
4. Last but not Least: Put split second 99% slow on her ultimate. Again, landing a 5 man ultimate on Illaoi can be completely unrewarded if the enemy Sejuani has ult, or the majjority of their players have flash. An AOE slow would add an effect to escaping enemies that would make that ultimate not feel wasted.

Anyway, these are all my thoughts. Sorry for the wall of text, but I think we can all agree that making Illaoi do more damage would be a disaster, but giving her the oppertunity to deal the damage incorporated in her kit could be the thing that makes her a viable high elo pick. Also, I realize that there are existing issues about Illaoi's kit that make her oppressive to play against, but this post is already too long, and let's be honest, there are some worse offenders running rampant as we speak ;)

Thanks, The Abactor