Does anyone else think Shaco could use a buff/rework?
Shaco has a pretty unique identity as that annoying champion that pops out of nowhere while you're laning to chuck a shiv at you. His role in a game is pretty weird - you can build him to be an off-tank, an assassin, a bruiser, an on-hit dps champion, an ap mage, a splitpusher, or whatever really. The one thing that can be said for certain though, is that Shaco offers little to the classic "drop all your AoE spells on them" team fight. On paper, Shaco appears to have some potential in a team fight - he can assassinate squishies, his boxes are AoE fears for 1.5 seconds, and he even gets a clone to help confuse the enemy. But in actuality, as many Shaco players have experienced, organized team fights are not exactly his cup of tea. There are three main contributors, in my opinion, to this:
-Jack in the Boxes are non-factors by mid-game: random AoE spells, a marksmen's auto attack, or a casual sneeze will kill a box before it even primes. There is the argument that boxes need to be placed beforehand - and I agree, they do. But when you consider that other similar things (traps/turrets) such as Heimerdinger turrets (scaling health), Zyra plants/Teemo shrooms/Jhin lotuses/Caitlyn traps/other traps (required number of hits/invulnerability), Jack in the Boxes are significantly easier to destroy.
-Shaco not having a method of escaping a fight after committing: if you choose to deceive into a fight, the odds of you surviving the ~7 seconds after stealth as worn off (and this is with ~40% CDR that most Shaco builds never attain) are about nil unless your team wins that fight. As one of the few champions that does not take flash (because you need the ignite to be relevant early game), you literally have no escapes.
-True Vision: it goes without saying, that Shaco's hardest counter is being spotted within stealth mid-assassination. This is a fair amount of counter play, that I do believe is necessary. Being spotted by a pink ward (don't forget the fact that they are cheaper now... and are EVERYWHERE) or a champion ability (like Thrill of the Hunt) should definitely be fair game. Being hit by a snowball in ARAM, oracle's elixir (5 minutes of Shaco being utterly useless...), or the bug where if you start an auto attack while in stealth but it never lands/you cancel the auto and you get revealed, is a bit excessive though.
Some small buffs to consider: -Make JitBs like other traps and require 3 autos to kill. -Have the deceive cooldown start upon activation (kind of like Varus Q). Surviving for 8 seconds instead of 11, or even 4 seconds instead of 7 as a squishy assassin that has no real escapes is at least feasible. It would at least make having cooldown reduction remotely valuable.
As he is now, I believe Shaco to be in a pretty poor spot (kind of like where he's always been post-nerf). Other champions do what he does (with differences in the kit of course) but better and with less difficulty. Rengar or Talon do the whole "delete from stealth" business significantly easier. Elise has a more potent early game presence with a better transition into mid/late game... and she can team fight or assassinate as she pleases. For the effort required to play Shaco, there is not a matching reward. He sports a fairly decent win rate, usually slightly above the 50% mark, but is used very infrequently at higher levels of play, mainly due to the high risk to low reward of the champion. The win rate can also be partially attributed to the very low pick rate (indicative of mostly Shaco enthusiasts playing the champion and doing well, instead of a large pool of players) - if one were to take the win rates of only, for instance, Graves mains on Graves, it would probably be quite a ways above where the average is.
Anyways, please offer some opinions on the matter. Thanks.
