I'd like to see some Changes to Master Yi Tested
Master Yi has never been a shining example of healthy or balanced champion design, for a couple of different reasons:
-
Very few combat options - Master Yi really only has 2 abilities. Most champions have 4, some even have cooldown-restricted passives that could be treated like a 5th ability (like Bard or Galio). And really, Master Yi's Q usually feels like the only ability that matters because Meditate only has a few uses (the most common use of it is as a simple attack reset - which really says a lot about how pointless channeling it is).
-
He has no significant interaction with his opponents - He fights his enemies by right-clicking them to death, what else do I need to say? His kit doesn't really give enemies many ways to outplay him in a 1v1 scenario. In teamfights, 80% of fights unfold in one of two ways: He gets CC'd or burst immediately at the start of a fight and doesn't do anything before he dies, or he gets one kill and then sweeps the rest of the team with no way to defend against him.
-
He's super imbalanced between soloqueue and competitive play - There are a few reasons for this. He brings nothing to a team except damage; that damage is very unreliable because he's vulnerable to CC and burst; and he's very unadaptable in situations where he can't go all-in. He relies on common soloqueue mistakes such as bad team compositions, junglers failing to capitalize on his inferior early game pressure, and teams reacting poorly when he engages (either they react too slowly and he starts chaining kills, or they fail to space apart their CC and he dodges more than one of them with Alpha Strike). He can also punish enemies disrespecting him very fast and hard because he can engage on them almost instantly without any warning. The last reason he's bad against good players is because he relies so much on kills and assists to keep up his momentum in fights.
So, I'd like the balance team to try a few different changes to his kit and see if any of them are worth pushing to live. It should be noted that Yi is mostly balanced right now, so any buffs should be balanced with nerfs and vice versa:
-
Nerf Highlander's passive and compensate with strength to other parts of his kit.
-
Require Master Yi to manually channel for one or two seconds for Highlander to activate, so enemies have more time to react to him and can interrupt him.
-
Make Meditate immune to being interrupted by stuns. Or knockups. Like Galio's W. But not necessarily immune to all types of CC.
-
Add tenacity to his ult, or a cleanse upon activation of Wuju Style. Even a minor cleanse that only works on slows would be nice.
-
Instead of 7 seconds plus 7 for every takedown, Highlander's duration could be indefinite but drain mana like Swain's ult.
-
Instead of resetting on kills and assists, put Alpha Strike on a charge system. Perhaps he could have a charge indicator like Annie.
-
Give Master Yi a ranged skillshot on E. Maybe one of those "air slices" like Link or Kirby can do. Hitting epic monsters or champions deals damage, and activates Wuju Style.
-
Throw Wuju Style on his passive, and put a ranged skillshot on E. Possible effects of E: revealing stealthed champions, reducing the cooldown of Alpha Strike, applying an anti-shield debuff, applying on-hit effects, shredding armor. Perhaps the damage could scale with Crit like Xayah's E.
-
Alpha Strike's cooldown could go down at a doubled rate while channeling Meditate. Or it could be completely refreshed by channeling Meditate for all four seconds.
-
Wuju Style could reset his attack timer.
-
Meditate could share its healing with allies nearby him.
-
Highlander could create a "tailwind" granting bonus movement speed to allied champions following him.
-
Activating Wuju Style could grant a very brief burst of attack speed, not stacking with Highlander.
-
Wuju Style could be changed to a low-cooldown short-range skillshot like Yasuo's Q, instead of an on-hit effect.
-
Wuju Style could be changed to a passive stacking effect like Darius' passive, Jax's passive, Kled's W, or any number of 3-hit passives.