So I had an idea for a Shen change
There has been a lot of discussion since the recent riot "
Shen can't be a tank/assassin because reasons". After doing some thinking, maybe the problem for building like that isn't in his "role" but his kit's purpose. His Q gives the attacker health regen, the W is an in combat shield that resets his passive on hit and his E is a taunt. These are all moves of a duelist that are kind of underwhelming on a tank. Imagine if they added an AD scaling to the regen on Q, but not the damage. Or if his W reset his E every time he was hit with a basic attack. That would create a decision; "Do I build tanky or do I get more damage to be tankier" now that he would benefit from both. The problem thus lies in his kit not supporting the proposed playstyle of "Tank/Assassin".
Now you may notice one thing, I was talking about him being a duelist, not necessarily a tank or an assassin. You may also notice that I left out his ult. This is because I propose a new ult altogether.
R-(I don't have a snappy name for it, summoning with Realm I think) (No energy cost) roughly the same cooldown as his current ult
Shen takes his target to another realm. They leave Summoners Rift and face each other in combat for (8/10/12) seconds. If the enemy is killed in the realm, half of the cooldown is refunded. If Shen is killed in the realm, the target returns to the spot untargetable for 1 second.
The realm would be a separate map from Summoners rift and only accessible by Shen and his target. The idea of it is, 1. If Shen is to build damage, he can properly duel and get the reset on the ult, If he builds tank, now the ult is a displacement from a team fight entirely, and 2. Shen is no longer a support for the team, he is now the one that takes the carry out of the fight, or the hyper tank out of the fight, or that annoying fucking Zed out of the fight. Now ultimately (get it), this is a very overpowered ultimate. It could get out of hand if he gets a ridiculous lead, but looking at other champion's designs, this won't be the most broken thing in the game. As stated, if he builds full damage, he's easy to be killed, and if he builds full tank, he does no damage. I believe with all of these additions to his kit, it would allow him to fill the role of Tank/Assassin, Assassin being used as a term for someone who takes another champion out of a fight.
Tell me your thoughts about this. Does it belong in League? Does it seem to be too divergent from his original design? Does it fulfill the idea of a tank/assassin?
). Shen started out as a dedicated support tank. But then in the middle of S2 Riot reworked Shen into a pseudo tanky-dps (one of the old classes that was absorbed into the umbrella term of "fighter"). But, mainly due to the nerfs that his taunt received in the process, he was no longer seen as a good support tank. Finally, an Assassin Tank is a bad idea. Tanks are, by definition, low-damage, high durability disruptors and initiators. Assassins, by definition, deal extremely high damage and are are made squishy to compensate. Class-based design revolves around the same kind of trade-offs seen in any engineering design effort. Any champion that got the best of both worlds would be completely unbalanced, simply because it was not subjected to the same tradeoffs that all other champs are.
