Potential Ekko buffs in 9.16: Wasted buffs in the wrong direction!

As an main, I see that Riot is planning on buffing him in patch 9.16. I should be celebrating, you might think. After all, Ekko didn't receive any significant buffs for 3 whole years. Sadly, Riot completely missed the mark on how Ekko should be buffed and aimed their changes in the wrong direction.

First, let us see what are the buffs Ekko is, most likely, receiving in 9.16:

• E - Phase Dive: bonus magic damage increased by 10 at all ranks (from 40 / 65 / 90 / 115 / 140 to 50 / 75 / 100 / 125 / 150)
• R - Chronobreak: cooldown down from 110 / 90 / 70 sec to 110 / 70 / 50 sec.

Ask any decent Ekko main in the world, they will tell you that these changes are not needed at all, and do not fix Ekko's biggest problem, which is his early game and super weak laning phase. Sure, these buffs are welcomed but, we didn't need them at all.

• Buffing his E is ok but our E damage is already decent enough as it is. Sure this will help us trade ever so slightly better in lane but, it's no big deal. We've survived without this 10 extra base damage for years, adding it now will change little to nothing. And I'm emphasizing on the " base damage " aspect of it, because it's not like +10% AP scaling, which would be a real buff. 10 extra base damage is nothing and doesn't change his damage output by a relevant amount, really.

• As for Ekko's ultimate, this completely surprised me. The R already had a decent CD on it, and I, personally, never had a problem with its CD. I even think that the CD is a bit low for such an ultimate, but I digress. Lowering the CD is just a very lazy way to buffing Ekko, and it's gonna push players to be more reckless and get worse with their decision making, as Ekko's playstyle is based around patience and good decision making. I guess they're doing this to push new players, and players who don't play him as often, to play him more and forcing his pick rate to increase so lazily. And this pisses me off, really.

What Ekko really needs is this:

• Buff Q's damage early game so we can actually farm and last hit with it, in laning phase, since the Q takes a decent time to comeback and the Q1 damage part of it is just laughable and can't last hit for sh*t. This is even more urgent especially that Ekko has so many bad matchups that can zone him out of the minion wave easily. Right now, not only we need rank 5 in Q (lvl 9), but also we need at least 90 AP to be able to even one shot the backline minions, for crying out loud. Before that point, it's so hard to last hit minions with Q without going OOM or stepping in melee range to get the cs and get poked out of lane for free. Needless to say, laning phase pre-lvl 9 (and 90 AP) is so bad.

----> This problem is easy to fix: Since Q1 and Q2 have seperate AP scaling on them (Q1 has 30% AP scaling and Q2 has 60% AP scaling), Riot can actually target buffs one of them (Q1 would be my target of choice) without over buffing the total damage of Q. And this will help with the laning phase without making Ekko an oppressive laner, like so many other champs in league nowadays.

• If you wanna buff his E damage (even though I think it's unnecessary), give him increased 10% AP scaling on it, not this BS 10 extra base damage that barely changes anything.

Ekko is, by no means, broken or OP. He's not overall weak, either. He's actually pretty balanced, I would say. Well, I should say " was " since if the new R buff goes to live servers, people are gonna start complaining about how broken Ekko is and how his R is pretty OP and spammable, and that would lead to Riot nerfing Ekko, unfairly, by targeting other parts of his kit (Riot style), when it didn't need to come to this in the first place.

So please Riot, stop buffing champs in the wrong areas of their kit and actually start listening to your community feedback, goddamnit!

[sg-ahri-3]