My thoughts on the new Shen

Hi,

I recently started maining top and comfortably went to Plat 5 with it, and I would like to give my opinion on 's situation.

I advise you, If you're not familiar with 's kit, to read this article. http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Shen And this is the first thing, Shen is so impopular, that I ended up winning some lanes because my opponent had no idea why I would have that much attack speed. The same way, some allies would get out of my zone because they did not know it would protect them from Auto-Attacks.

Playing for a while now I can state : is not as bad as people imagine. The impopularity he is facing now is only due to the fact that he does not feel appealing at all, worse, feels counterintuitive. And the very first games I played as were horrible, I would be yelling outloud how l hated Riot for killing the champion.

Now I feel different, because I learned how to master the Spirit Sword properly, and it really is about that, the sword feels disturbing at first, but once you master it you will almost always be able to proc it on a Champion, and it is very important : The damages you get from this are massive.

Now one of the common mistake i see on players nowadays in the build : . This item is really really good on Shen, but the main mistake comes from the fact that people always want to build it. As you are not supposed to invest in too much damage, and sometimes building this item will cost you the game because you won't tank enough.

This item should only be built when you are fed, and never in your early build, elseway it is not worth it. Note that in some cases you would rather build .

And I really can understand that people want to build damage on Shen, after all, a lot of tanks in this game build at least one offensive Item ( builds , can go with some AP )

And it would feel really good to be able to build some damage on Shen on a consistant way, but wouldn't that feel a bit OP ? Well it could, if you refer to http://champion.gg/champion/Shen, is actually the character dealing the less damage on the Toplane. And this is because although 's damage early on are relly decent, he ends up with a very bad late game scaling, unless your opponent builds HP and then your Q will rekt him hard. His scaling is almost non-existent, ( you roughly have 2 HP Ratio on your taunt and your shield and then only AP Ratios, and since you don't go AP on .. Yeah, how much of you did know that 's ult has 130% AP scaling ? Probably no one, because it has no impact)

So the big question is, Why would you give an insane AP scaling when he doesn't build any AP ? This is some part of 's kit that could be easily remove ( unless it becomes a popular troll i guess ) To give him something more consistent.

If i still check Champion.gg, It seems that Shen mains only do at most 54% Winrate, which is actually no that bad !

So yeah the Character has a lot of potential, the Ult and the Zone are both really really OP, But out of that sometimes feel like he wasn't there, because he cannot really afford to build damage, AP carries deal more damages to towers than he does, and it's unpractical when you want to split before ulting to get in Teamfight. I'm not saying should be able to 100-0 a tower in one wave, but this is really getting ridiculous at the moment. Also really relies on his team mates to carry a game, say you peel your ADC in teamfight, which you do very good with your kit. Well you won't carry if the person you peel is not skilled enough. Shen hardly carries by himself, which makes it even less interesting in SoloQ, although this precise point doesn't explain why he's not played in LCS

I could go on all day long, but i'd rather have your thoughts on the Character, Tell me if you feel the same, I you think i'm wrong tell me aswell, and if you have an Idea of tweaks for I'd also be glad to hear them

Personally I think is balanced and healthy for the game, but if Riot would like to become popular, they would need to tweak him a bit to make it more interesting to play, maybe by allowing him to build a damage Item somehow maybe not, is actually fine as he is, but he's just not popular.

TL:DR: Read what I wrote. Edit : Forgot to mention that it would be nice to have an indicator to know when the Spirit Sword will move, this would just be QoL at this point.