@Any Rioter who may answer: What were the plans for Shaco's rework?
Shaco
Early game abuse reduced, tricks increased while providing more playmaking and teamfighting options in the late game Backstab (Passive) has a cooldown, but provides a greater effect Shaco's Deceive (Q) duration starts small and scales with rank Shaco can place Jack in the Boxes (W) while Invisible, briefly revealing him
This is about as much information as we get about Riot's plans and goals with Shaco. Honestly, that's not much to go on. The core problem with this lack of information is that we, as players, have a hard time giving a feedback on how we feel about it.
Right now, Shaco lost almost all of his laning power:
His E deals half of it's damage and is no more amped by backstab and his W can't be stacked anymore (and this is a good change, box nests are unhealthy). Those were the two things that made lane Shaco almost a thing. You could barely survive a lane before the changes. Right now, lane Shaco seems like suicide. He can't poke. He can't bait people into 2-3 boxes anymore (unless the person dashes into the middle of the box grouping). All he has right now is a weaker all in.
He also lost not only some early game power, as well as some mid and potentially late game power with the changes to his passive and Q. As a passive, his new one is stronger-ish (?). Instead of a fixed 20% damage increase, you get 120-145% damage dealt on his auto attacks when hitting from behind. But it has a cooldown, so you won't be able to quickly use it on the same assassination more than once. Combine this with your Q no longer critting and it becomes a really odd change. However this can all be tunned with numbers.
Overall, his rework seemed to lose one core aspect of what Shaco is to it's players: flexible. Right now you can go for a all-in/one shot build with IE, Shiv and a shitload of AD. You can make an all-in one shot AP with Lich Bane, Luddens, Proto and some heavy AP. You can go the drive by route with Gunblade, Luddens and thunderlords. You can go tanky on hit and turn your clone into a real threat. Hell, right now you could probably build 100% full tank items and have Shaco work out somehow. You could go top lane, you could jungle, you could go mid or you could be a creative kind of support.
Right now, Shaco seems tailored to become a full time jungler. Maybe a support using his boxes as wards now that they last longer with AP. But right now, 2 of his possible playstyles seem to be lost.
As a second topic, we hear the "we're watering down his early game potential, but compensating him with new ways to outplay oponents". Well, overall, his burst seems to have been reduced at all stages of the game. Previously, he had his Q giving him a 220% crit. Now, it gives him 80 bonus damage. 116 bonus damage if attacking from behind. Almost 160 if you are attacking from behind AND bought an Infinity Edge. Meanwhile, AP Shaco was straight up buffed in this regard.
With his shiv dealing 125 damage with 8% missing health, for AD Shaco his E became a ranged AA, with it's only real use being the missing health damage.
His Passive, while stronger than the current one, is gated by a CD and unless the enemy is running away from you, won't be used more than once in a fight. If you, for some reason, is able to keep backstabbing your enemy, you get rewarded with more damage.
Combining his seemingly lower burst with his missing health damage and CD gated passive, it worries me that Shaco will loss some of his flexibility in lots of ways that may have not been the goal of the rework.
I'd really like an answer from a Rioter so we can know what Riot had in mind while reworking Shaco because right now, we're all at lost.
PS: Sorry for somewhat clunky text. I'm taking some meds that mess up my ability to focus for a long time, so writting is kinda hard. However, I feel like this is something that needs to be posted.
EDIT: Adding the comment of Leon Crowl to it, as he basicly puts out some nice points which are pretty valid and should be addressed. None of the text bellow is written by me.
No longer revealed by pink wards
This isn't necessarily a buff to Shaco as it is a buff to the other assassin's aswell.
Backstab damage against monsters increased to 200% from 120%
To make up for his weaker clear considering they put his passive on a cooldown now and it doesn't affect your E damage anymore. Overall, his passive got more nerfed than buffed. Yes, it is affected by CDR but a burst shaco, at least for me and a lot of other higher elo Shaco mains: CDR was meant to always be irrelevant because we mostly played burst Shaco. We disregarded Lifesteal, CDR and made our builds as efficient as possible for just pure damage. I've pondered over the most efficient CDR build since Shaco's rework was announced but all I can think of is black cleaver and Iceborn gauntlet. Anything else is too expensive and too inefficient.
Deceive mana cost reduced to 60 at all ranks.
Technically, this doesn't really matter at all. At least, Shaco mains such as myself already knew how to easily manage mana and we haven't had mana issues at all. Unless you're just that bad on him. In any case, I would've rather kept the scaling just for that 50 mana at rank 5 since we max Q now anyways. This is about as useful as taking away 5 AD from warrior.
Deceive gains a 50% AP ratio (Live - 0% AP ratio) and the bonus damage is increased by Backstab (So you get a 50% AP ratio increased by 145%, if you have 300 AP that's 217 bonus damage on Q, along with 145% of your total AD).
I want you to disregard any additional AP ratios because they don't do anything for us. Unless you wanna try AP Shaco but that's even worse. As I've said: Quality of life changes. Also, I could mention the fact that the stealth was reduced and now scales but i'm pleased with that change, however it is worth mentioning.
Jack in the Box now lasts longer the more AP you build.
Quality of life change. Unless you're telling me I should play AP Shaco to make these AP Ratios relevant? Every 20 AP my JitB gains 1 extra second of duration (not triggered). Oh! Amazing! I do take AP blues but that was because originally my E's AP Ratio was 100% so it was for increased early damage on E. Now that E doesn't have that, there isn't a whole lot of point of taking flat AP Blues over MR blues or even CDR blues. I also never got to 20 AP before like.. level 15 if I had the mastery that gave me AP/AD per level.
Jack in the Box has more health based on Shaco's level.
No, this is a balance change. JitBs had alot more health early-mid but now it has either the same or more health later on. Which means, boxes die faster most of the time. Hooray!
The slow on Shaco's autos from Two-Shiv Poison is doubled at rank 1.
I'll give you that, but this just encourages Shaco to play DPS or Bruiser. Why? Because it's not really useful for a burst Shaco. The slow was just something to help us position our box behind the enemy and it was/still is pretty useful, I'll admit. However, this buff doesn't help Shaco very much because at the end of the day it's a 20% slow while Katarina gains 50/60/70/80/90% decaying MS or Rengar who has 30/45/60/75/90% slow on E which becomes a snare when empowered, Rengar also has a shitton of movement speed when ulting and his ults duration was basically doubled, if not tripled. He has an increased leap range and so much more I could talk about with the other assassin's in which makes them a shitton more relevant than Shaco, but I digress.
Shaco's Two-Shiv Poison active has a missing health ratio.
At the cost of pretty much his entire base damage. Even at max his E does 125 base damage? Not to mention his ratios went down to around 80%/85%. At the cost of 3% missing health? Not only does that not deal any damage early to mid, that still isn't enough later on when you have it maxed for what? 8% of missing health? Let's say it does true damage to tanks: If that tank was missing like 1k health (which would be kind of hard to do by yourself) it'd deal about an extra 80 damage? IF.. it was true damage. If you include the MR, it'd deal a lot less, I assure you. Also, don't even dream about doing anywhere near as much to squishies because the missing health ratio would be almost non-existent. Maybe it'd deal 250-300 extra damage on a more beefy ADC who has frozen mallet or something and they were low enough. In which, most will just lifesteal you to death if you didn't kill her by that time. Is there points where this is useful? Situationally, yeah. However, in most cases it is more useless than how it used to previously be. Fun fact: Shaco's rank 5 E(PBE) has less base damage than most abilities at rank 2 or 3. Jinx's Flame Chompers for example does only does 5 less damage two-shiv poison at rank 2 (120)
Shaco's Hallucinate has gained a .75 -1.25 second fear (Live - no CC)
Incorrect. I have nothing to say... that's incorrect. I talked about them disrespecting Shaco because around the first time they talked about the update they mentioned Shaco's Hallucinate had a fear when exploding. It doesn't, it drops mini-boxes(that share the same health bar, in which they die instantly in any fight.) those boxes have a brief delay like normal ones and then fear when triggered. Yes, this means Riot made a mistake only to Shaco. These were summarized explanations on what the champions will be doing and not a detailed one but they did lie unless they implement it later on but why wouldn't they have implemented it already? Makes no sense.
