My complete thoughts on the Master Yi buffs/nerfs

#Alpha Strike

Removing the cast time from Alpha Strike has interesting implications. On the one hand, it means the spell becomes much better for reactively dodging spells. On the other hand, it will no longer be possible to "disjoint" CC such as Blitzcrank's E, Leona's Q, etc. by timing your Alpha Strike to get hit by the CC during the cast time. This is consistent with spells like Playful Trickster or Vlad's pool. And like those spells, I expect there will be no more "I was in Alpha" moments where you take damage (from non-DoT spells) after you've cast Alpha Strike. This makes a huge difference for players that play with low latency.

The second major change was reworking how the 'bounces' work. Before, you were untargetable for 0.25s to 1s depending on how many targets you have to 'bounce' to. Now, there will always be 4 strikes no matter how many targets you have. The 'leftover' bounces go back to your main target to deal extra damage, or at least that's my understanding of the change. This means there is no damage wasted when you Alpha Strike an isolated target, and it means the animation always does 4 slices. This is how we have the now-static untargetability duration. If you always have 1 second of untargetability, then you can reliably dodge spells like Morgana's Q (slow moving, fat hitbox) or Ashe's arrow. If you have only 0.25s of untargetability, that's very hard to dodge fast spells with.

#Highlander

These changes are just straight buffs, in my view. You lose some movement speed in cases where there are a lot of MS buffs being stacked, but in most contexts (particularly in the early game) you're much faster than before. This means Master Yi doesn't need to use Alpha Strike as a gapcloser as much, and can focus on using it defensively to avoid CC and high-damage spells. The attack speed changes are good as well; you have more attack speed at level 6, and less attack speed later in the game when you're close to hitting the attack speed cap anyway.

The duration change is hard to unpack. It changes the way Master Yi is played. With 10 seconds as your starting duration, you can activate it at the start of a fight and be relatively confident that it will last until the fight is over. This means much less worrying about getting your first reset, and less worrying about getting slowed and kited to death. You can just focus on fighting smartly, positioning carefully and picking your moment to commit.

#Wuju Style

In the context of the above buffs, these nerfs are fair. This spell may benefit from a rework, but for now, that's beyond the scope of the changes. I'm totally in favor of removing the free AD in exchange for more powerful abilities.

#Rageblade

The math's been done; Master Yi will be very weak if the Rageblade and Wuju Style nerfs ship in the same patch, as they are. Master Yi is a stat check champion, it is simply the way his abilities work. He will not be less of a stat check unless Wuju Style is reworked into a spell that has some kind of skill check. As a stat check, Master Yi needs a stat advantage over opponents to win fights. If the Rageblade changes go through (and I think they should), then Master Yi will need buffs to his damage and/or survivability to compensate.

#What I would Change

• I think 1 second of untargetability is a bit too long. I would make the animation faster so that you have closer to 0.75 s of untargetability. This has a few benefits; it makes Master Yi less frustrating to play against because he's not spending as much time untargetable in fights, and it makes the distance-traveled-per-second (600 range in 0.75 seconds as opposed to 1 second) of the spell better. Because really, 1 second of untargetability is overkill for dodging spells with intent.

• If you do decide to keep the duration 1 second, though, make sure that Duskblade resets when you use Alpha Strike.

• I'm concerned that the isolated Q damage may be too high for what is supposed to be a DPS champion that fights with basic attacks. Especially with crits. I would knock the bonus damage per hit down from 33%, to 20 or 25%.

• I think it would make more sense for Master Yi to have 175 attack range, than 125. That affords just a little more freedom of movement for creative positioning while attacking enemies. There's also always been a visual dissonance between Master Yi's attack animations and his actual range.

• Some time ago, after the Highlander's duration was nerfed, Meditate was changed to pause Highlander while channeling. In light of this buff, I think 10+4 seconds of Highlander now would be slightly too much; a 9+5 seconds paradigm would be more balanced.

• Attacking lowers the cooldown of Alpha Strike by 1 second. That's enormous, and it heavily discourages you from using Meditate. I would test something like "The cooldowns of your basic abilities are lowered by 0.5 seconds for every second Meditate is channeled."

• Change Double Strike to a 3-hit passive, instead of a 4-hit passive that stacks itself. So instead of AA-AA-AA-DS-AA-AA-DS-AA-AA-DS, our attack pattern would be AA-AA-DS-AA-AA-DS-AA-AA-DS.