I found out yesterday that over 50% of players max W second on Elise, even though doing this results in a lower winrate than if you max E second (<20% of players do this). 45% vs 49% WR in Platinum+. Now you can go on to say that winrates do not mean much, but I think this is at least significant as every Challenger/Master player I have seen play Elise maxes E 2nd and there is evidence that this is the better way to go on Elise overall. It kind of shows that most people don't know how to play Elise right now down to a core aspect of building her up (part of this is probably due to her unpopularity right now). When you max W second you are weakening your teamfighting ability even more as the only CC that you have is now a 1 second linear skill shot stun, which is less than Taric's stun I might add. Your E's duration doubles if you level it, making it much more potent during the mid-game teamfights, being able to catch a mispositioned target much more effectively or peel for your carries.
I do agree with what Stonewall says (even though he does max W second). She can only set her team up to win, which was of much greater importance in Season 3 and 4, when she was strong. Her ability to do that now is mitigated as Junglers have a much larger role in the game and are more core to the team in the mid and lategame. I do agree that her full combo is clunky and very long, which is why I think E should reset her R CD so she can jump on an opponent immediately in her spiderform after she stuns the enemy, because sometimes your stun is all you want from your human form to keep an opponent from escaping, but then you are forced to sit there and Q W auto them and hope you do enough damage to execute them before the stun expires as you wait the 4 seconds for your R to reset.
Having her E reset her R is very nice as it would probably prevent her from being as much of a stun bot because you could E, R immediately to attack the enemy in spiderform, run away or give chase a little bit, use R to get to human form, Launch E and repeat the process, instead of having to Q W and auto them in human form while you wait for R again. The problem now is that this can take a really long time in a team fight considering you have to wait for your R CD's in both forms which means you can and should only switch to spiderform in a teamfight if you think you can get a kill off of it, as otherwise you are hindering your ability to launch another E in human form and possibly follow up on that one if there is a better chance of getting that kill.
That's some things that I've thought about. I find it incredibly odd that Elise is the only champion with a linear skill shot CC that does not do damage. If this is to continue, I think there should be more utility added to E to make it a better skill. Right now, it is better than W in my opinion, especially after the buff to the Spider E, but it is still an ability with absolutely no damage or extra utility aspect to it, so her Q and spider autos are really overloaded to compensate, and I think this is a big problem of Elise right now. She has 1 REALLY strong skill (technically 2) and then everything else is just kinda meh by comparison. I feel like there needs to be a shift in her skills' strengths to make Q less powerful early, and her other skills more powerful later. Peace.
