Evelynn Ultimate Rework Idea

Evelynn has been in an unusual state recently. Due to a variety of nerfs and tweaks over the past couple of years, she's emerged as an off-tank engager. Meddler has recently acknowledged that the disconnect between Evelynn's current role and her theme leaves her unsatisfying to play, but they don't want to just give her more power (she already performs well in certain cases).

Targeting Evelynn's ultimate for changes would be an excellent step toward making her a more satisfying champion because:

**1. It heavily suggests that she should be an initiator, which is completely at odds with her fantasy. **

Evelynn is supposed to stealthily assassinate carries, yet her ultimate is most effective when hitting multiple full health tanks. As a result, it becomes nothing more than a mediocre slow if she is trying to execute her intended assassin role. The last thing an assassin should want to do is dive headfirst into the entire enemy team.

**2. It currently consumes a large amount of her power budget in an inconsistent and woefully unsatisfying way. **

I'm not going to argue that her ultimate is weak; potentially 25% of a team's total hp in damage is no joke. A 1500 damage shield is also nice, as is the 80% AOE slow. Clearly this is a powerful ability for an initiator; however, it is worth much less on an assassin. Trying to finish off low hp enemies? Unfortunately, Evelynn's ultimate can't possibly kill them. Using it on any fewer than two or three people feels foolish. With a 150 second cooldown at level 6, this isn't something you can feel good about using outside of teamfights or large skirmishes (which is exactly where Evelynn shouldn't be). The ability meets its great potential in precisely the situations you don't want to be in.

3. It's the only part of her kit that would have to be changed to realign her gameplay with her fantasy.

Evelynn's Q, W, and E all fill important roles in her assassin kit. Hate Spike for farming and sustained damage, Dark Frenzy for gap closing, and Ravage for burst damage (all traits assassins should have). Her ultimate, on the other hand, is the clear outlier. Ah yes, it's for a large shield, shredding tanks, and slowing people (or any combination of these at a given time). I'm sure the designers wanted it to be versatile; the shield would allow some safety in teamfights, while the % damage would make her useful even if she couldn't get on top of the back line. These are good intentions, but we've all seen how differently it's played out. The shield scales excellently with armor and magic resistance, encouraging players to buy these stats. The percent damage is simply too good to give up, and players quickly saw that it was positively silly not to just initiate with it. Evelynn's ultimate alone has caused her identity crisis, and fixing it would be an efficient way to bring the champion together as a whole.

This being said, her new ultimate must do a number of things:

1. Solidify her identity as an assassin (which I'm assuming we want to retain)

2. Keep her balanced

3. Create interesting use decisions

4. Differentiate her from other champions

**What I propose is the following: **

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Agony's Embrace

Range: 650/250 Cost: 100 Mana Cooldown: 130/110/90

Active: Evelynn casts all enemies in the target area into darkness, applying nearsight and amplifying Evelynn's damage dealt to them by 20% (?) for 3 seconds.

I like to think of this as a greedy version of Vladimir's ultimate combined with Nocturne's vision reduction. Here's how it addresses the criteria I put forth:

**1. Solidify her identity as an assassin ** There's nothing that says "assassin" quite like damage amplification! This one is sure to be controversial due to Deathfire Grasp's removal, but let me explain. Deathfire Grasp was removed from the game because it was destroying strategic diversity; supports, mids, and just about anyone would buy it just for the damage amplification. Unsurprisingly, this was seen as unhealthy. It's much easier to tune the numbers on one ability than an item for every potential user. The nearsight also fits very well into her current kit and theme, and allows her to regain some safety from tanks in teamfights that she will lose with the shield's removal (except you will actually have to not run right into them).

**2. Keep her balanced ** The great thing about % damage amplification is that it automatically scales throughout the game. There's no need to keep track of AP ratios, shield increases, or increased slows. If it was found to be too strong, it could be changed to scale variously. Even if it eliminates some degrees of freedom in balancing, I would argue that its simple design may prove easier to balance equitably than her current ultimate. It also forces Evelynn to play aggressively in order to capitalize on the damage.

3. Create interesting use decisions

While most of the time it would probably be used as damage amplification, this ultimate actually does have some strategic depth that may not be obvious at first. Consider that hitting the peelers or tanks of a team with this would leave them struggling to defend the carries. With this in mind, it is optimal to hit as many people as possible with the ultimate in a teamfight setting, but its core use of simply increasing damage and isolating carries is retained. Because nearsight is a powerful tool in teamfights, smart Evelynn players would think twice before simply spamming it on anybody they saw.

4. Differentiate her from other champions

Of the two champions I compared the new Evelynn ultimate to, she would be more similar to Nocturne. While it may seem that Evelynn pays a steep price by losing the teleport and global vision reduction, consider that she could usually do much more in the short window of opportunity than Nocturne could. Because only her damage is amplified, she isn't forced to fight in full-team brawls to the degree of Vladimir. She's encouraged to build damage to take advantage of the % damage buff, but must play intelligently or still be killed very quickly.

I know that the design isn't perfect, but I hope I managed to communicate what I think Evelynn is struggling with and one potential solution. Any comments or suggestions are, of course, welcomed.

tl;dr: Evelynn's ultimate has broken her identity. Make her more assassin-like by changing it to a mix between Vladimir and Nocturne's ultimate.

I also want to give credit to Companion Prism for coming up with the basic idea of the new ultimate.