Boards›Gameplay

Riot, can you please take another look at Kassadin?

Unnamed Feeder·4/2/2018, 5:03:58 PM·3 votes·1,054 views

Kassadin, ever since the new runes, has consistently been hit by indirect nerfs, and right now is on a pretty bad spot. While he’s not left in the gutter of solo queue (ex viktor or ryze) right now, he’s sitting on a low win rate of 47.44% in plat+ (champions.gg). These are the nerfs that affected him, with the minion aggro changes being by far the most negative one on him.

  1. Removal of dft - Kassadin’s primary keystone was removed with the new runes, and he was left with Aery and comet, both of which were suboptimal at best due to the subsequent Aery Nerf and comet’s unreliability. While this was pretty hard on him, I will give the benefit of the doubt because of how strong presence of mind is on him.
  2. THE MINION AGGRO CHANGES - by far the largest Nerf to Kassadin. With his null sphere now drawing minion aggro, Kassadin now has very limited ways of trading in lane, forced to throw it and getting beaten to death by minions, or eating ranged harass for free. It was a GIGANTIC nerf to his laning which not only dropped his win rate, but also FEELS awful to play as; it’s truly frustrating to have to eat up harass while having virtually no way to trade back efficiently. A lot of Kassadinmains in the reddit page agree with this point. Sure Kassadin is a late game champion, but that doesn’t mean he has to be a punching bag early, especially considering some late game Champions like fiora or orianna have ways to protect themselves early.
  3. Small Indirect changes, including the stat changes of the precision tree (took away raw ap and gives attack speed, something Kassadin never builds), nerf to coup de grace and scorch, and an mr buff for talon. No compensation for Kassadin.
  4. The upcoming presence of mind nerf - the one buff that Kassadin got from the new runes is being converted to the old morellonomicon passive...this isn’t BAD on Kassadin, but definitely worse than the current version.

A lot of champions have gotten quick and sometimes immediate compensation buffs for every nerf. Kogmaw’s partial w compensation buff, twitch e buff after nerfing him for one patch, tristana receiving bonus damage on her jump for the auto attack range nerf, fiora’s ult getting the movement speed nerf reverted after bramble vest in season 7, Zoe getting buffed after he got fixed, and upcoming pantheon buffs mentioned in quick gameplay thoughts for the minion aggro changes (the changes were most likely meant for HIM). And yet Kassadin and other champions (ex Viktor from the Rylais nerf years ago) has received gigantic indirect nerfs and not received proper (or in kassadin’s case, any) compensation buffs. There wasn’t any update on plans for Kassadin either; riot has almost been completely silent about him ever since the minion changes. It is honestly things like this that make players accuse riot of favoritism, and sometimes it’s really hard to convince myself otherwise.

Riot, I beg you, please take another look at Kassadin. He’s the one hit by far the hardest with the minion aggro changes, and since has been both weaker and less fun to play as. I understand that I am a Kassadin main (well, formerly) which may make me biased but honestly I really think Kassadin deserves compensation for the consistent indirect nerfs.

If you took your time to read this, thank you and I really appreciate it.

TLDR: with multiple indirect nerfs, primarily the minion aggro changes, I believe Kassadin needs compensation buffs.

4 Comments

Killer of Night94/2/2018, 7:34:53 PM1 votes

The new manaflow band is a good buff on him but it won't compensate the old presence of mind + the Cd red of the actual one is trash on him (it will give no cd back). I would see a better damage on his W ap ratio (passive damage) for encourage the AS steroid of rune + a better damage on his Q (+10/20 at all lv). Base AS should be up as well and +2 armor to compensate minion aggro.

nm10104/2/2018, 7:41:46 PM1 votes

People are being bad (as they do), give them time to pick up the new Kassadin build and they'll do much better.

the weeaboo4/2/2018, 10:14:20 PM1 votes

My thoughts on this:

I think you're misdiagnosing Kassadins problems. DFT, PoM, the old minion aggro; those are all just band-aids trying to cover intended holes in Kassadins kit to keep him balanced.

DFT was NOT Kassadin's primary keystone. It was just players like Apdo abusing the poke it gave on him to win trades in lane and basically get through his laning phase. Literally useless lategame. Nothing Aery can't do.

your complaint about minion aggro is the literal reason they changed the minion aggro. To prevent mid and top laners from mindlessly spamming their poke spell with no punishment. If you want to keep the enemy low you're gonna have to thin out the wave beforehand so you cant just do R > Q > back off over and over until theyre low enough for you to blow them up in one rotation and/or zone them off CS. Kassadin is an assassin and he should be taking opportunities for him to 100-0 someone or make roams, not playing like a mage and poking until you get them into their death threshhold.

Going off that, Kassadin is meant to have a very weak laning phase. He needs to. He's probably the strongest assassin lategame since his combo is on such a low CD, and he can easily get in and out with no problems. If you were to give him an even okay laning phase it would be wayyyyy too easy to just glide through laning phase straight into the mid and late game. To be balanced Kass needs to be vulnerable early; to poke, ganks, waveclear... because he excels at what he does once he gets there.

Now yes new Presence of Mind is going to be much less useful to him than the current one, but, again, he shouldnt really have that rune in the first place. Kassadins lategame weakness is supposed to be he needs to limit his ult uses if he wants to be able to stay in a fight so he cant just RRRRRRR all over a teamfight and not get hit by anything and just pick up kill after kill with no chance of escape. This is pretty much the only reason he dips into precision, except for maybe Coup de Grace, so getting attack speed won't be a problem if he's not using this rune. Taking Absolute Focus/Manaflow Band or Sudden Impact/Relentless Hunter for your secondaries will work fine.

He is sitting at a sub-50 WR% but if anything thats because right now his build is RoA > Seraphs/Lichbane and if he goes tear (which he really should since it's pretty strong right now as well as giving him massive mana when combined with RoA. However this build takes forever to scale up, and he can't rush the Steraphs because he needs HP from the RoA to not get blown the hell up as soon as he goes in. I think if he is going to get buffed it should be to his HP growth/resistances per level or buffing his passive to make him tankier so he can just go straight to Archangels and Lichbane without having to crank out the gold for RoA first. His would make him scale faster so he can reach his mid/late game carry status faster, keeping up with the other assassins that spike with one item (duskblade users, katarina and akali w/ gunblade, etc.)