A Little Thought on Talon

I don't know if Riot understands this or not, but the rework with Talon basically added more counterplay to his kit without giving him any outplay potential in return. Gutting his base movespeed+Duskblade losing its permenant %movespeed+making his E scale with movespeed+there being 2045794328756941567941 different ways to apply slows in this game makes his E pretty unviable if you want to use it to really juke anything, plus it's a one-way trip across the wall, so you still can't do what Zed can do. But now, he can't dodge things with his E either, or line up a good round of AoE, or burst people with any semblance of reliability. Sure, he roams faster, but that's something any champion can do if the player is good at macro. Also, roam potential and being useful after he gets to where he wants to be are at least equally important.

Of course, I'm not saying that Talon isn't doing well at the moment. But what we need to realize is that Talon is currently strong not because he has a good kit; it's because he has a kit that has great synergy with lethality. Right now, lethality is hella bonkers, and how well a champion's kit can abuse this stat takes priority over how strong that champion's kit is overall. When lethality goes back to being sane, however, not all champions who goes supersaiyan with it will fall down. A lot of champions in the lethality circlejerk will still be viable, like , just off the top of my head, but Talon won't be one of them. His kit leaves too many room for outplays, but he himself has very little in-combat maneuverability. Where he used to have the options of dodging things with his E, predicting his opponent's flash and hitting all his damage regardless of what a target did, or just setting up some juicy AoE, he's now stuck hunting down people with less CDs and gold than him. Or, I suppose people with less brain cells who walk up as squishies to let him crit them to hell with his Q. But still, these are huge limitations to his power, so he has to be super duper hyper turbo OP when he does get his way to be more than a superminion. This kind of design isn't just hard to balance, it's not fun to play as or against. I appreciate the effort that Riot has put into the rework, but for the life of me, I really can't see more pros than cons.