@Riot: Master Rank longtime Cassiopeia player's thoughts and critiques

Hi, this is God Karthus NA and has been one of my most player champions since Season 1. I recently got my smurf account on which I main Cass to Diamond: http://www.lolking.net/summoner/na/43126641.

I highly enjoy her playstyle and love the uniqueness that she brings to the game. That said, the rework changed several things, both good and bad. The goal of this post is to provide my own thoughts on the rework and how to improve the current Cass.

I'll start by discussing the old Cassiopeia. She was probably the strongest lane bully in the game due to her insane level 2/3 DPS and incredible zoning power. People would either max Q or E depending on personal playstyle and the matchup. Maxing Q can be really oppressive since it's a spammable 3 second CD, high damage nuke, and that's on top of her E spam. Maxing E would make all-ins always favor her if she lands her poison. Her weaknesses are that her range was a huge limiting factor to how she can be played in teamfights and that she had little mobility to maneuver her around in engages (which also made her very vulnerable to ganks). She had to rely on her off-the-charts DPS and ultimate to maintain her presence throughout the game. The old Cassiopeia was really strong in the damage and laning department, but had some "clunkiness" to her kit -- namely that her E is not very responsive and does not reset its CD when it should have. It was occasionally unreliable and people sometimes preferred to focus on her Q spam harass instead.

The rework had one main goal in mind: nerf her bullying power and emphasize her as an extremely high DPS mage. While I like the idea of the rework and some of the refinements Riots made, there are some parts that I feel Riot could've done better on.

**What I LIKE about the rework: **

1. Her E feels much better to use. This was a much needed change to make her DPS reliable.
2. She gets access to mana restore and spell vamp without items. Restoring mana with E last hits helps with her farming a lot and synergizes with her new passive. Spell vamp is always good on Cass since doing high single target DPS is what she does best, but previously she had issues with itemizing a since often times she would rather by straight up damage, mana or .
3. Her ultimate cooldown reduction was a good change to increase her mid game presence.
4. The extra movement speed she gets from Q improves her kiting potential and makes her feel more like a carry.

What I DISLIKE about the rework:**

1. Q's cooldown increases by a flat 1 second at all ranks and then drops back to 3 seconds after you get 200 passive stacks. That feels insulting to be honest; you make the 25% cooldown reduction look awesome but in reality, it merely changed Q's cooldown to pre-nerf status and Q is Cass' only spell that significantly benefits from CDR (granted, a ~1 min ult is nice for more late game uptime). If Riot wanted to nerf her Q's early game bullying power, then reducing its base damage and have its cooldown decrease with rank would be enough.
2. Her E now costs 90 mana costs at max rank; this is very limiting especially that she not longer has a passive that reduces mana costs. This change FORCES her to buy a or a or else she has no way to dish out her DPS in teamfights.
3. While she gets free AP from her passive, it FEELS bad to get AP her on her because of her harshly nerfed AP ratios on all skills besides her E. Her ratios needed to be nerfed because of the free deathcap passive, but I feel that some ratios shouldn't be as low as they are now. I would rather Riot decrease base damage to increase her ratios so it feels good when you get a lot of AP on her.

I've spent some time thinking about her numbers and possible changes. Here is what I imagine what an improved Cass looks like:

Passive: Aspect of the Serpent Mechanisms to garner stacks (poisoning enemy champions, E'ing enemy champions, and killing poisoned units) remain unchanged.

New AP scaling mechanism: Grants 1% bonus AP per 15 stacks (for comparison, this is +26% AP at 400 stacks). Caps at 450 stacks. I prefer a constant AP scaling passive rather one that upgrades at certain cutoffs because it would feel better to gain stacks on her

75 stacks: Spell Vamp on E unchanged

175 stacks: Cassiopeia gains 15% Cooldown Reduction My changes involve that her Q has decreased cooldown with rank. 25% CDR would make it ridiculously low. More importantly, giving only 15% CDR makes the player not feel as bad for building a CDR item (namely Grail or Morellonomicon)

375 stacks: Twin Fang gains 75 (or 50 -- I'm not too familiar with balance in the range department) cast range The one thing that's preventing Cass from being a true late game teamfighting carry is her range. Unlike ADCs, she has to do something additional (land her poison) to dish out her DPS. It's very mechanical challenging to do this along with positioning and kiting. Giving her a bit of extra range (but not too much) for late game makes her carry identity much more realistic and reliable while being fair

Q: Noxious Blast Base damage reduced from 75/115/155/195/235 to 60/90/120/150/180 AP ratio increased from 0.45 to 0.6 Cooldown decreased at later ranks from 4/4/4/4/4 to 4/3.75/3.5/3.25/3

Again, I dislike the idea of giving her incredibly high AP only to harshly nerf her AP ratios. 0.6 ratio is more in line with similar abilities (Q abilities from ). The base damage is reduced to balance this for early game, especially that the cooldown gets reverted to 3 at max rank for more mid game power. Buffing her Q for mid/late game also reinforces her identity as a poison mage.

W: Miasma Base damage increased from 10~~/15/20/25/30~~ to 10/20/30/40/50 AP ratio increased from~~ 0.1~~ to 0.15 Cooldown INCREASED at earlier ranks from ~~14/13/12/11/~~10 to 16/14.5/13/11.5/10

Even for an utility spell, the base damage scaling on this spell is just flat out atrocious. I feel that a bit more base damage is needed to make this spell feel good to rank up on later in the game (since Cass almost always max this spell last). AP ratio is increased so this spell doesn't do horribly low damage even with 1000 AP. To compensate, the cooldown is increased for early-mid game (along with the decreased CDR gained for passive) to promote more careful usage of this spell since its slow is pretty strong and should be used timely.

**E: Twin Fang Mana cost changed from 30/45/60/75/90 to 40/45/50/55/60

*Honestly, I have no clue why Riot decided to pigeonhole every Cass into buying either Rod of Ages or Tear with those absurd mana costs. With this change, higher rank 1 mana cost also makes it more risky to try to aim for the level 2 cheese kill. *

R: Petrifying Gaze AP ratio increased from 0.5 to 0.65 Cooldown decreased from 120/110/100 to 115/105/95 * This may sound weird, but it sucks to see that you have over 1k AP and your ultimate still doesn't do 1k damage. Even though Twin Fang is your primary source of damage by far, this ultimate's damage still needs to feel like an ultimate's damage. Slightly increasing the AP ratio achieves this goal rather well without going overboard since she does have insane DPS. Cooldown is decreased by 5 seconds to partially offset the lessened CDR gain from the passive.*

---

So these are my thoughts on the current Cassiopeia. @Riot: I may not have the numbers right, but please consider my ideas to improve her current gameplay.

AMA on the topic of Cassiopeia!