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Rek' sai needs to be reverted to her previous state

HeroicSuitcase·10/10/2018, 9:44:34 PM·31 votes·12,816 views

I saw that Rek' sai was mentioned in one of the previous gemaplay updates and I wanted to express my thoughts on the champion currently. Rek' sai has been pretty underwhelming for almost the entire season, and I feel that she needs to be reverted so that she is played as a full tank. Currently she is the worst champion in the game after 15 minutes. A former LCS analyst agrees with me on that point. She has the same pitfalls as Rengar before his initial rework, being that she is a squishy champion that has to dive into a team and will either trade a kill or simply die. Rek' sai is even worse than old Rengar because she cant simply instakill a squishy target, due to the fact that she has to first knock the squishy up, Q-AA-AA in order to get full rage and then E for the true damage. Most of the time this isn't even enough to kill a squishy, whereas old Rengar could simply triple Q and instakill.

Furthermore, Rek' sai's ultimate is one of the worst abilities in the game. This is due to the fact that it is so telegraphed; everyone can see the animation begin, and the animation is quite long. Additionally, her ultimate can be dodged by every single champion in the game because essentially everyone takes flash. Champions with a dash such as Lucian or Graves can also avoid her ultimate simply by dashing away. Her ultimate does a good amount of damage, but it's simply not enough to make up for how bad the rest of it is. Also, if a champion survives your ultimate, it is very difficult to continue chasing them down with autos because of the animation of the leap. This is one of my biggest problems with this champion. She feels clunky to play in that regard.

Rek' sai is also very immune to CC, which isn't a problem only she faces, but when built damage oriented, she gets blown up before she can do anything.

Another glaring problem with Rek' sai is her W. Her W is very bad currently, much worse than it was before her rework. The knock-up only affecting one target is pretty bad, considering most champions can simply just kite away from her. Another obvious problem with her W is that it does not prioritize champions. This leads to situations where an enemy can simply run into a minion wave to avoid being knocked-up, which makes Rek' sai's ganks useless. This would be solved by reverting her so that the W can knock-up multiple champions, with the knock-up duration dependent on how close Rek' sai is to the enemy champion.

Additionally, her passive healing is pretty much negligible; when clearing with her you still get relatively low.

Reverting her to her previous form would fix all of these issues. When built as tank, she could dive into a fight and knock up multiple champions. She still has no escape, but she is meant to soak up damage so this is not an issue. As tank, she can also face-check without dying instantly. If reverted, she could also get multiple knock-ups off in a single team-fight, due to the fact that she would be tankier and her per-target knock-up CD would be lower. As a said before, current Rek' sai is completely useless in team-fights because enemy champions can simply walk away from her to avoid the knock-up. Tarzaned recently released a tier list video and he placed her in the lowest or next to lowest tier. Valkrin also expressed that Rek' sai is an awful champion. I haven't exactly kept up on pro play this season, but I don't think she has been picked at all, and typically only good champions are picked in pro play. It would make sense for her to receive the Rengar/ Leblanc treatment.

TL:DR Rek' sai is a bruiser with assassin scaling. Her passive, W, and ultimate are very bad abilities with glaring problems that have yet to be addressed. Even after her recent buffs in patch 8.14, she is still one of the worst junglers in the game at all levels of play. Rek' sai needs to recieve the Rengar/ Leblanc treatment.

39 Comments

MorganFreemanBot10/11/2018, 7:15:05 PM5 votes

Put simply: No.

Put longer: Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

http://na.op.gg/champion/reksai/statistics/jungle

Outside of the pro scene, Rek'sai is a surprisingly strong pick. Over all she has the 6th highest jungler win rate in the game, sporting the 3rd and 5th best winrates from 15-25 and 25-30 minutes respectively.

She's also in the top 20 winrate champions (not junglers, -champions-) for diamond within the last month. Challenger as well, but there are so few games in Masters and Challenger that those stats are kind of neglible.

Rek'sai is not bad. She is not weak. She is not subpar, lacking, or deficient. She is well balanced.

Rek'sai's niche is instituting a reign of terror for the first 20 minutes of the game and setting her team far ahead. She is one of the best junglers in the game at this. Her E gives her tricky and murderous gank routes, her W gives her strong gank engage, and her damage makes him very tough to survive. She's more than capable of slaughtering enemy junglers and taking over their jungle.

With that said, Rek'sai falls off like a rock. As has been stated, she lacks the tankiness to be a main-line tank in the mid game. So once laning phase is over she has depend on her lead, & laners she set ahead, to carry the day.

Even then she's still dangerous. When it comes to picking up out of position enemies, tremor senses make Rek'sai second to none. She's also great at protecting her carries, and in a pinch you can engage with E > W > immediately ulti to go untargetable and (hopefully) live.

Buffing Rek'sai will absolutely put her over the top and make her too strong, which will warrant heavy nerfs and see her weaker than she currently is. Reverting her W would be one of those buffs; giving her freaking Malphite R on a 4 second cooldown, with a mere 10 second lockout, is not the correct way to balance her.

If Rek'sai needs ANY changes, it's to her passive (the healing could be safely doubled to 4% and she'd be fine) or her tremor senses.

Atm tremor sense is bugged so that there's a 1.5 second delay between someone -entering- its detection range and them showing up, which is frustrating. More-over though it renders her entirely blind to close-by enemies, and it's hilariously easy to juke her if you're nearby but not within her miniscule vision range while burrowed. Giving her a couple of 'rings' for her derection, say 1.5 update on the outer, 1.0 on the middle, and 0.5 on the inner, would go a long way towards helping her fulfill the 'apex predator landshark' fantasy without actually giving her much more strength.

Power Cosmic10/10/2018, 9:52:57 PM5 votes

Figuring her best role as a playmaker that only sometime can build AD, her ult is a bad fit.

BLIGHTBRINGER10/11/2018, 8:13:32 AM3 votes

I agree with all points made in this post after playing a few games of Rek'Sai for a while.

I like that she's somewhat of a damage dealer since that's what idea I got from her trailer teaser, the first time I saw it.

But I would be willing to sacrifice any needed damage if it meant I wouldn't get one shot by everything. And could actually survive to have a difference in teamfights.

Something that crossed my mind is... What if her current R could only be triggered when she has full Fury, and when she doesn't have any Fury, she can use her previous iteration of her ultimate ability?

But this alone wouldn't solve an issue that she has, she needs a gameplay update. The most important change has to be, her Passive and how it interacts with the rest of her abilities since only her E benefits from Fury.

SweedishGunner10/11/2018, 1:14:23 AM3 votes

She needs a passive buff or update.

Revert Skarner10/11/2018, 2:12:15 PM2 votes

I support this thread overwhelmingly, shes what I used to climb to gold V this year and it was pretty unsatisfying.

NaturesMayhem10/11/2018, 11:44:10 AM2 votes

She needs her ult to be reverted and receive some compensation buffs to her fury healing for jungle clear and Q for better damage scaling into the late. I loved Rek'sai's old ultimate. Even though it felt like a glorified teleport, it gave her a lot of power over the map and allowed for split-pushing and grabbing objectives at times that most champions can't.

5050BS10/12/2018, 12:53:39 AM2 votes

She just needs her AOE knockup back and her passive healing boosted again.

kargish10/11/2018, 5:48:51 PM2 votes

Why not give her some sort of Skarner treatment?

Put some undestructable tunnels around the map and allow her to use her old ult to those tunnels of her choice.

The Bad Touch10/10/2018, 9:50:44 PM2 votes

Paragraphs are hard.

Tontunator11/9/2018, 8:00:46 AM1 votes

She is very strong. I dont see her falling too much in late game as many people says here. However its true that she needs some fixes in it tremor sense and in the passive, what is pretty shit.

Also I will put that the tunnel travel longer than now, to differentiate it of other gap closers. Think that the tunnel is what define Rek'Sai, and at this moment it is a bad version of a gap closer. Also I will augment the duration of the mark, so you can surprise enemies, or force more situations, more easily.

Tahminatrix 10/10/2018, 11:07:07 PM1 votes

I just want the true damage to be taken off of her E and instead do more physical ….or even amplify damage (its an open wound from her biting as hard as she can after all) done to the victim because rek is one of the best junglers when it comes to stacking black cleaver on the enemy team already, true damage on her e is power that she doesn't make full use of (mostly being used to execute enemies rather than praying your R hits.)

And for the love of god change her R....her attack speed passive and fast travel active (somehow) felt a lot more interactive than just pressing R to dodge something and hoping the enemy you used R on isn't smart enough to put you in a stupid spot or dodge it...or both..

JohnnyNeverSins10/11/2018, 3:12:09 PM1 votes

I deal about 300-400 damage with AA,Q,Q,Q E What are you talking about? She is a beast early game...

HeazonZ10/11/2018, 5:15:38 PM1 votes

I can’t agree with this more. Her design is so messy atm. She has to build AD because all of her damage is in her scaling, but has to build tanky to dive and not get blown up immediately. She makes a poor assassin, tank, and fighter. Her unique strengths (old R map presence and tremor sense awareness) got completely gutted. There’s no reason to pick her over any other jungler.

Bârd10/12/2018, 12:23:12 AM1 votes

Passive

Not as weak as many people make it out to be, but it's not very strong in her primary role. It's like Morgana's W in that respect. If you play her in lanes, you can get two heals off per wave and that adds up pretty damn quick.

Reverting it to the old form would (ballpark numbers) double its healing, but also make it take nearly twice as long to both generate the fury and to consume it.

This change would be a small nerf, since even though the heal change would be about power neutral, this would be an indirect nerf to her E by making it so you can't get the true damage bite as easily.

For that reason, I'm not in favor of reverting it.

W

Something needs to be done with this spell to make it scale with levels aside from its raw damage.

Candidates include

  • CD
  • Per target CD
  • CC duration
  • Movement Speed bonus
  • Tremor Sense refresh rate.

The AOE knock up needed to go, but the spell does need some small buffs.

R

The core concept is actually really solid, it just needs a few changes.

  • The damage portion of Void Rush will follow them even through blinks/dashes.
  • Void Rush refreshes the CD of Burrow and Tunnel, as well as the per-target CD of Unburrow on the pounce target.

The spell opens up a lot of outplay potential with the untargetability and I find it hella fun.

Meanwhile, the old ult was lame as hell. If the ultimate ability of your apex predator is nicknamed the "Farm Alarm", there's a problem.

The only part of the old ult I'd like to see reincorporated is the passive attack speed, which I personally think should be added to her Q when it's active.

CIayman10/15/2018, 2:12:06 PM1 votes

As always, her ult being too good in pro play was what made them delete it