Kha'Zix, a Champion so Close to Viability (but not quite)

Yeah, sorry, this is going to be a long one. Stick around to the end and there will be a reward... sort of?

So, this probably won't come as a surprise to most people who actually played Kha'Zix for a reason other than that he was flavour of the month for a pretty ridiculous amount of time, but Kha'Zix is in an interesting place. For the most part, he's outclassed by other attack damage melees like Zed and Talon in mid lane. As for jungle, he has to deal with being almost all around inferior to Lee Sin and Jarvan IV. However, he isn't really that far off from being a good pick. I'll explain why, but first we'll have to elaborate on what makes him a weak pick.

Kha'Zix is a team reliant champion. I know what you're thinking... "Yeah, so is _______!". Mhm, you're right. There are a lot of team reliant champions in the game, and a lot of them can still be really good. Now here's the thing... Kha'Zix isn't just team reliant, he's also "enemy stupidity" reliant. That's right. I said it when he was broken and I'll say it again now; if you get caught in isolation, especially now since it's so easy to negate, that's your own fault. Sure, a Kha'Zix can max/evolve Void Spike (and butcher his early damage output) and build Ravenous Hydra to clear a wave. Contrary to popular belief, that rarely destroys the entire wave. If a single minion is still alive even remotely close to you, he has no isolation. This isn't even bringing in to it the fact that if Kha'Zix max/evolved Void Spike, he likely won't be evolving Taste Their Fear until last, as Leap is 100% necessary for team fighting. What does that mean? You're not getting hit for a 700 damage non evolved Taste Their Fear.

The point is, provided the enemy team is competent, Kha'Zix needs his team to create isolation for him during team fights. One of the most important things I teach players new to Kha'Zix is that if you can't get a kill/assist to reset your Leap, wait until you can. If you don't have isolation, odds are you aren't doing any meaningful damage and you're just going to die. Isolation is nigh impossible to get if the enemy team is dedicated to negating it. The area of isolation negation is so disgustingly large that a loose group formation should keep Kha'Zix at bay. If he jumps in without isolation, he has no idea what he's doing, just kill him. This is what separates Kha'Zix from other team reliant champions. Take Yasuo, for example. Yasuo becomes a monster with a proper team. However, skilled Yasuo players can still get off their own built in knock up. Is it easy? No. Is it possible? Yes. That is where the skill aspect comes from. As for Kha'Zix, if the enemy wants to negate your isolation, that's too bad for you. Even if you could manage to clear a wave and get isolation that way, there is nothing you can do against two enemies huddling up together. Kha'Zix's skill modifier is dwarfed by his enemy's incompetence modifier. Can he dominate a game full of 900 ELO players who don't know how to deal with isolation? Sure, but that should not be the bracket that this game is balanced around.

Alright, we've identified the problem, now where is the solution? Well, that's where it gets tricky. There are a few small things that could be done to make Kha'Zix a solid pick without breaking him (again). The first step is pinpointing Kha'Zix's identity as a champion. After between 2,500 and 3,000 games on the champion over all (adding up to a percentage of my life as in game time higher than I'd like to admit), here is what Kha'Zix is to me. Kha'Zix is a high burst, single target assassin notable for his reset and ability to evolve to meet the needs of the game, and is reliant on his Q for his main source of damage (but if you evolve Void Assault, you're wasting an evolution point, joke's on you). Notice what I didn't include there? Utility support, tank, offtank. Why didn't I include those things? Because that isn't what Kha'Zix is supposed to be. Watching season four Kha'Zix play was painful, be it the tank nonsense or the Void Spike 50% slow jungle spam (as far as I'm concerned, LCS players did not pick Kha'Zix, they picked Void Spikes at the end of season four).

Kha'Zix's role as an assassin needs to be cemented firmly. Players should be waiting for the opportunity to go up close and, if playing well, be able to eviscerate a squishy carry in the blink of an eye, all the while putting himself in harm's way to accomplish the task. His survivability should come from evasiveness, not the ability to just tank out whatever retaliatory damage he takes. The pinnacle of his evasiveness is achieved after earning a kill or assist, resetting his Leap. This means that Kha'Zix's kill potential inherently effects his survivability in a team fight (beyond the basic "I killed that guy before he killed me so now I can live"). However, as has been stated before, it isn't easy. Doing this relies on your enemy making a fatal error or your team displacing your target and creating isolation for you. These are both things that your mechanical prowess can not effect, unlike nearly any other champion in the game.

What can be done to make that better? Well, to start, there's a small change that could go a long way. Riot often talks about clarity. The clarity policy is good. It's always a plus when you know what's going on. So, what does this have to do with Kha'Zix? Isolation. As you know (I hope), Taste Their Fear alerts Kha'Zix and his target as to the fact that they are isolated. What you might not know is that the isolation bonus is calculated on damage application rather than cast. This means that you can make a high speed assassination play on a marked isolated target, just to have them step into the massive range of isolation negation mid Taste Their Fear cast. Now you're sitting in a terrible position with no reset, all because your attack did pitiful damage. If isolation was calculated on ability cast rather than damage application, it would allow Kha'Zix to be more confident in his assassinations. Yes, the calculation on damage works both ways. An enemy who was saw themselves as not isolated could step into isolation during the split second cast and die. However, that just serves the underlying point that the marker is unreliable and could easily be fixed by this change, leading to far less frustration for both parties and rewards for playing Kha'Zix intelligently and making fast decisions.

Of course, many players also view the range nerf to isolation as overkill, and I agree. While reverting it completely back to previous values could be dangerous, there should be room to make isolation a bit easier to obtain. Combining an isolation range based buff with the aforementioned change to when the bonus damage is calculated could be enough to nudge Kha'Zix into a solid position without making him overpowered (again... again). Of course, there are numerous other balance ideas that could be used along with the damage calculation change to reward Kha'Zix for playing like an assassin and give him a more reliable damage source.

For one, a potential change to Evolved Void Spikes that allows it to act more like Graves's buckshot could help cement Kha'Zix's identity. What I mean by this is, say one spike hits the target... It would do damage lower than live value. However, if two or three hit the target, the damage would increase to higher than live values. Anyone familiar with the champions knows that the only real way to hit an enemy with multiple void spikes would be to get close, rewarding a traditional melee assassin play style. An additional change could be made to the healing factor, allowing it to also scale with multiple void spikes in a similar fashion to the damage, granting him some extra survivability without including damage reduction (like his old ultimate). A compensatory nerf to Void Spike would be to decrease the slow, discouraging the detrimental Void Spike utility spam technique that made him an eyesore in season four.

Another place where some changes could be made that would impact Kha'Zix's game play in conjunction with some of the other proposed power shifts (likely not "make or break" alone) would be his passive. Changing the ability power scale to an attack damage scale and the magic damage to physical damage could hurt his early lane and ganks a bit (since the magic damage isn't decreased by the armour runes and early armour items players run against Kha'Zix in lane), but allowing the bonus damage to be effected by armour penetration could benefit him in the long run. The scale may need to be increased slightly in addition.

Leap is also an area that could be tweaked. To start, the attack damage scale nerf on Leap is the only change that I can outright say was completely unnecessary. I understand that "a long range gap closer with a reset shouldn't do a lot of damage", but that's just the thing, it still never really did. This seems more like a "hey look we did something" change that doesn't really belong anymore. Of course, as I mentioned earlier, some of these proposed changes would need to go hand in hand with compensatory nerfs and that is only to be expected. One thing that I've never really liked about Leap is that it resets off assists. This seems to reinforce the utility/tank play style that Kha'Zix was not designed around. Kha'Zix should be viewed as a hyper carry assassin and should have to make important decisions when team fighting. "Do I want to take this kill and use it to hunt down the escaping enemies or do I want to give this shut down to the ADC?". The decisions would have to be fast, as of course, your likely team isn't going to wait while you stand around like an idiot contemplating life as a giant purple insect, but that's part of being a good player; thinking on your feet.

A combination of the changes I have listed here (or other ideas altogether) could be just enough to push Kha'Zix, a champion bordering on the edge of consistent playability, in to a good position without making him overpowered (again, again, again). What ideas do you have that could make Kha'Zix viable again?

Oh, and here's that thing I mentioned at the start for sticking around until the end. Yeah, I drew it by hand, I suck at computer art. I also suck at colouring, go figure. It's Cell Kha'Zix.

TL;DR-

Kha'Zix is too reliant on the enemy team being bad and not reliant enough on being a skilled player. A few small changes could help. Also he needs a Cell skin since they're pretty much the same and legend has it that they share a voice actor.