Rakan truly is underpowered

merlinsdemon·Mar 12, 2019·4 votes·2,077 views

I've been on a Rakan spree the past 2 days, and I have a 20% win rate with him in ranked.

I know, seems awful. But the crazy thing is that I do fairly well every game. He has a good mid level power spike and a nice kit, but the power spike takes him from underpowered to normal for a few levels, then he rests back into underpowered. He seems to be weak both early and late game.

I think the problem resides around the matter than every single one of his Basic abilities has several drawbacks put on it. All champs have drawbacks, but Rakan has drawbacks to every ability except his R.

All of his Basic abillties have ridiculously low base damage, with decent AP scalings. Not phenominal AP scalings, just decent.

Q - Slow missile speed, short range, feels like it prioritizes minion hitbox(probably doesn't but just seems like it). Fix Q - It needs to be like a miniaturized Karma Q, not a huge explosion radius, but if the enemy champ is standing on the minion, they should be hit also. It's not a CC, it doesn't even have a slow. It's an extremely low damage ability, not spammable with it's high cooldown, and it provides a tiny aoe heal to you and your teammate(s).

W - Low range, bad positional delay, and the CC doesn't scale! Fix W - It would be better if you put the delay into the pre-teleport, like Thresh's hook has a windup. So he's broadcasting the spell rather than sticking his head out into enemy territory for .35 seconds while he waits to be CC'd. The knockup should scale, from 1.0 seconds at rank 1 to 1.4 seconds at rank 5.

E - Low range, low shield value, doesn't stack. It's like a targeted Lux shield, except it only hits 1 person for half of lux's value. It a nice dash, but the range needs to be up'd to 700. Several ADC's have 700 range, and they can auto attack the enemy, but I'm not in range to cast my shield on them when I'm on top of the enemy. Really poor design choice. Fix E - Bump the range +100 so that it's 700. And allow the shield to Stack.

Basic attack range. His basic attack range is 300. Fix Basic attacks - Bump that up to 500 or 600. He's halfway melee. He gets out auto'd by any other non-melee character. Morgana, Zyra, etc; he can't trade back with.

6 Comments

TobykachuMar 12, 20192 votes

His ultimate needs to be given more counterplay before they buff the other aspects of his kit.

merlinsdemonMar 12, 20191 votes

But his ult has a ton of counterplay.

You can knock Rakan up, knock him back, stun him. You can use your dash to get away, flash away, split so he can't hit everyone, use QSS. The CC is decreased by tenacity.

In the 20'ish games I've played him, I think the most I'e ever gotten my 1.25 second charm off on was 4 team members. And by the time Rakan is knee deep in your team, you just flat kill him and he's dead. His team isn't going to be close enough for him to use his E.

The ult CC is a flat 1/1.25/1.5 seconds(if you ever make it to level 16 as support).

TobykachuMar 12, 20191 votes

You can say the same for every engage tool though. "Malphite engage isn't THAT strong because you can just flash it!" The thing with Rakan ult is that it simultaneously gives him one of the best engages in the game and almost definitely the best engage coming from the support role. Not only that, but it has the flexibility of being used as an incredibly good disengage. I am all for them buffing other aspects of his kit, so he can actually have an impact bot lane pre 6, make his Q actual deal some damage/heal for more, make his W much easier to land, but since his ult gives him so much reliable versatility, it's very hard to justify buffing him too much.