How to Balance Master Yi

I'm unimpressed by the balance changes that have been floated on the PBE. Not because I'm a greedy Yi player that doesn't think they're good enough for me to win games, but because they don't make him in any way more balanced in the grand scheme of things. He'll still be trash in Diamond 2 and higher, and kind of oppressive in low elo. We can do better.

There are a number of ways we can approach this:

• Pause Highlander during stasis effects like Stopwatch and Guardian Angel. These are smart and responsible item purchases, but because using them wastes almost half of Highlander's duration, he is discouraged from using them.

• Give him 175 attack range instead of 125. His sword is huge. This gives good players more space to orbwalk and dodge spells, while having little effect on low elo Yi players.

• Have Alpha Strike cool down 3x faster while channeling Meditate. Meditate is essentially a spell for stalling time, but Master Yi has only one spell cooldown that he would want to stall for. And because Alpha Strike has its cooldown reduced by basic attacks, it's actually better in most situations to continue attacking enemies instead of Meditating if your goal is to stay alive. Because untargetability is a far better defense than Meditate. This buff would somewhat fix that.

• Give Tenacity while Meditating. This way Yi players can use W as a soft defense against CC, even if the spell interrupts his Meditate.

• Shorten Meditate from 4 seconds to 3, and lower the cooldown to 25 seconds. Normally, Meditate can only be fully channeled if the enemy team had a bad draft with no CC. So this nerf would have minor effect on high elo Master Yi, but it will hurt him in contexts where he's already a decent pick and doesn't need that strength.

• Change Meditate to have decaying damage reduction. 60/70/80/90/100% damage reduction in the first 0.5 seconds, decaying to 10% at the end of the channel. Rewards well-timed Meditates and punishing players that use it for too long.

• Nerf Highlander's resets. +7 seconds for every kill/assist is too much, I've had it last longer than 30 seconds after a fight. I would reduce it to +6, or put a cap on it so that Highlander cannot last more than 12 seconds after the last kill/assist (like Vayne's ult). This is a good way to remove unnecessary power from Master Yi, and hurt his ability to get completely free pentakills.

• Revert the nerf to Highlander's duration (i.e. change it to 10 seconds, +5s per kill/assist) or give it more movement speed, but give it a casting delay like Taric's ult so he can't fly off the handle at a moment's notice and kill any enemy on sight.

• Give Master Yi bonus armor (scaling with his AD) for 8 seconds after fully channeling Meditate. I think it's a good idea to reward Master Yi players that plan their engages, but it has to be a buff that's more useful than simply using Meditate for the attack reset.