The issues I have with the new Tristana

QuickHunt··3 votes·908 views

First of all, good job with the new visual update. I wasn't a fan when the update was first revealed but after actually seeing her in game I'm quickly growing accustomed to her new design.
Some issues I see are that her voiceover currently seems too quiet, and that the current splash art on the PBE needs A LOT of work. I mean, it makes her look like a Yordle hillbilly.

Now onto the gameplay. This is the issue with her Explosive Shot (E): It's power is hugely gated a LOT of the time. When you mark a target you have 4 seconds until it explodes, and you need to get it to 4 stacks for maximum damage. So, you need roughly 1.0 attack speed in order to reach that goal (it's a bit less in practice because of projectile travel times and whatnot). Tristana has a base attack speed of 0.656, meaning that barring specialized runepage setups and starting the game with a Dagger, there's no reasonable scenario you can actually reach 4 stacks in the first few levels. So right off the bat, Tristana only has access to 75% of the power of one of her abilities.

"But Rapid Fire (Q)" you say. On a typical rune/mastery setup on Tristana, you can JUST reach 4 stacks with E if you pair it with Q. But now think about Rocket Jump - in the earlier levels you don't have enough time to reach 4 stacks AND trigger it with Rocket Jump to get the bonus damage afterwards, there's just not enough time. Q is on a 20 second cooldown, Explosive Shot is on a 16 second cooldown (scaling down to 12). Meaning that E's power is largely gated by Q's cooldown, at least early on when you don't have any attack speed items. Even taking into account attack speed scaling from levels, you can't get maximum effectiveness out of E (and W) **without **Q until you've built ~40% attack speed from items. Typically Tristana wants to rush AD in the form of an IE or Bloodthirster, so the only attack speed she's going to get from items early on is from Berserker's Greaves. And bear in mind, you would have to be attacking 100% of the time in all the above scenarios.

TLDR:

  1. Tristana's E is gated by Q's cooldown
  2. Tristana's E scales with AD but it's power is largely gated by attack speed
  3. Without Q she flat-out does not have access to her 'best case' damage combo until she has built more attack speed than Zerker Greaves
  4. By the time these issues disappear in game, Tristana would likely be relying on autoattacks rather than abilities for damage.

How to fix it (IMO) Change E to 3 stacks max and increase the bonus damage to 33%. Right now, compared to her old E Tristana loses a fair bit of damage if she doesn't get at least 2 or 3 stacks on the enemy so I think this is a reasonable buff. Most importantly setting the max to 3 stacks will massively lighten the burden of building attack speed in order to be use her skills effectively.

4 Comments

Kuroi863 votes

And here I thought that was on purpose to help her with a little extra dueling power but preventing her from abusing it early game until she got her attack speed.

KnivingDude1 votes

Or fuck everything about runes and get a 41% Attack Speed rune page with 1 armor.

AtheosisX1 votes

Err...you aren't supposed to get max damage on Explosive Shot in most situations.

MagicalMacabre1 votes

I wonder how rushing a Bork or zephyr would do on her. Would help amp the as and even provide some cdr.

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