Bruiser Fizz: The Kha'Zix Problem Again?
Ever since
's recent power shift, I've been noticing a bit of an increase in the number of games we see the fishstick on an AD bruiser build. Now, this has always been an off-build for him, seeing as he has decent defensive abilities and is an AA-based champion, high AP ratios or no. But the problem I see with him now is his W, Seastone Trident. Or more accurately, its downright ridiculous attack speed scaling.
Many of you may remember a certain Void bug
being hit EXTREMELY hard with the nerf bat in patches 4.3 through 4.9. The reason? He was able to run on a typical bruiser build, and still output damage that matched other assassins. He had high AD ratios across the board, was extremely slippery mid-fight, and evolving his Q back then gave him huge amounts of % missing health damage against isolated targets on a 3 second cooldown. After months of attention, he was finally swatted out of the Lee Sin bracket and given a proper role: a roaming assassin who picks on single enemies that got separated from their team. Works nicely with champions that punish grouping. But I digress.
Fizz is starting to work towards that point. At the press of a key, he gets 5 seconds of on-hit % missing health damage. 7% missing health may not seem like all that much for a single ability--heck, Lee Sin and Elise can both easily outdo that--but it becomes much less fun to deal with when it's coming at you at 1.75 attack speed plus an on-hit dash, on top of the physical damage and DoT effect from his attacks. If too many people figure this out, we may end up seeing Fizz get Sona'd. That is the new term for Olaf'd. Yes.
My suggestion: nip the problem in the bud by revising his W's active.
New W Active: Fizz's next 3 autoattacks are empowered, dealing additional magic damage equal to 10/20/30/40/50 (+4/5/6/7/8% of the target's missing health), as well as inflicting double the damage of Seastone Trident's passive effect. If Fizz does not use all three attacks within 6 seconds, the buff wears off (think Nami's E). Cooldown reduced by 2 seconds, but only starts when all three attacks are used or the ability times out.
Numbers, of course, are subject to change, since I'm no balance expert. The main point of this ability is to prevent him from unloading 5+ autoattacks on you with a super-strong damage boost, enabling assassin Fizz to still deal more damage than his bruiser build. Thoughts and discussions would be much appreciated.