Ahri's New Charm Passive, and How to Make It More Rewarding and Useful to High-Skilled Players.
REQUEST
I would like to suggest that Ahri's charm be slightly adjusted, so that it's base damage and scaling is lowered slightly, but increases her total damage output by 20% for those 5 seconds, not just ability damage. This would include basic attacks, item passives, and item actives. I'm not certain if it would be healthy to allow this effect to take place with Ignite, but it may be just fine. Either way, this would do a few things to help make her more rewarding to players who have a higher skill level and understand the fine details of how she works:
- It would help her to have that little extra kick of damage in the early game for trades, and help her to secure that kill on an enemy trying to sneak away with a sliver of health when all your abilities are on cooldown.
- It would potentially adjust her build to be even more of an assassination build to take advantage of the passives/actives from items such as Gunblade.
- It would really reward players for proper use of basic attacking, item actives, and other passives from items, and give her a slightly higher skill cap without making her any more difficult to learn.
- It makes more use of those 5 seconds that the Charm passive is enacted, and allows things like Elder Dragon Burn to do a bit more damage.
- Consequently, this would help those few individuals who try to make her work as an AD Carry feel some love, recognition, and relevance.
I do not necessarily think that item passives and actives must be included in this bonus damage, but I do feel that including basic attacks to the bonus damage from her Charm would be a healthy, rewarding asset to her kit.
Thank you for reading and taking this request into consideration,
Shárpie
REASONING:
Ahri has a new passive on her E - Charm, as of Patch 8.8. This passive states that "When Charm damages a champion, Ahri's abilities deal 20% more damage to them for 5 seconds." I would like to start off by saying I have played thousands of games on Ahri from before the points system, and have around 250,000 points on her currently. While I do primarily play jungle at this point, playing primarily
Elise, my heart will always be with Ahri. As an ex-Ahri onetrick, I really like this new addition to her kit, but I feel it is incomplete. When you land a charm (which isn't exactly difficult), landing your Q and W are basically guaranteed to land thereafter, save the use of a
Quicksilver Sash, or a
Tahm Kench intervention. What aren't guaranteed to be used properly, however, are basic attacks, item passives, and item actives. For many champions, the knowledge of when to use actives, how to effectively use item and champion passives, and especially knowing how and when to sneak in basic attacks during trades and assassinations can mark the difference between a 'normie' and a pro. Take a look at
Riven, for example. Knowing how to animation cancel so you can sneak in extra item actives or auto attacks between abilities is what makes the mechanical difference between a weaker Riven player and a highly-skilled Riven player, like Box-Box.
I spoke with Riot Tank about it over at Riot Support, and he agreed that it would reward high skill players, and would potentially be a great addition to her kit, but that it may be too good, and that players would be able to abuse certain items, such as the passive healing from
Hextech Gunblade. This is why I'm suggesting the lowered base damage and scaling on her charm. Let's start with the base damage. I would suggest lowering it from 60 / 90 / 120 / 150 / 180 to 50 / 80 / 110 / 140 / 170. It would balance out the early game a bit more. Her base AD is 53, so lowering the base damage on her Charm and adding bonus damage to her attacks moves that missing 10 damage to her first auto attack, and then subsequent attacks after that are rewarded. When an Ahri gets behind, it can become very difficult to be useful for anything besides being a waveclear machine, and I feel like this could help her to have a bit more healthy relevance in the early game by giving her a pinch more early damage which requires good positioning and a landed skillshot to take full advantage of. I believe lowering the AP Scaling ratio from 40% to 35% or even 30% would help to balance out the late game extra damage from item actives and passives, and force the player to know how to use her entire kit and build more effectively to make full use of her.