Talon is a polarized champ, too strong in some situations, too linear/weak otherwise. He needs TLC

I agree. Here are some ideas.

1. Remove the Level 2 cheese by reducing his passive’s base damage early but increasing its growth to match his current numbers at Level 6. This change removes the stat-skewing first bloods that he earns because of it while also giving Talon rewarding, non-burst, late-game power for landing his all-in. This change also reduces the difference between his lower and higher elo performances, where the first-bloods are less common.

2. Require out-of-combat status to cast his E. Specifically, Talon cannot cast E if he has taken damage from enemy champions in the past 2 seconds. This change would require Talon to first escape his pursuers and then resume rotation, rather than just wall-hopping from kill to kill. E would become an out-of-combat rotation tool like that of other roaming midlaners.

Kinda like Fizz used to be. With his pole hopping BS he was broken, but if it were completely take away he'd be worthless.

Make his e slower while in combat and to compensate, make his w faster per level? Or maybe make him scale with lethality, making his passive apply grievous wounds, making his abilities proc his passive after a certain level, make him able to jump walls while invisible, or frontloading the talon w damage? Obviously not all of these at once but these are just random ideas.

I hate it when people play Niche, non-scaling Champions, they abuse the early game advantages that the kit inherently has, but then get mad when the character falls off versus scaling characters.

I play Kayle, and the dude can literally do nothing to me all laning phase (or even the entire match). He never even got a single passive proc on me the whole match, I was down 5 cs until he started roaming (at which point he became behind in CS, as I would simply call out what lane he was going to; no gold for time spent, and no xp either, smart warding wins the day).

As it is, at least a Zed can try to kill me (good luck at it though, I'm putting 3 points into W early and will have 120 armor before 10 minutes bub). If he wasn't so broken in some aspects, they'd be able to better increase his overall power so that he is viable. As it is though, sure, he'd land his W (1 part, not 2) on me, and then I'd walk out of it before it came back (meanwhile he'd take a Q + E into the face for 20% of his HP at lvl 2). This is the issue with Talon, Zed, and similar characters, they are ENTIRELY reliant on the enemy team having trolls in order to win. If our top lane (or more commonly, bot-lane) avoid being ganked, you automatically lose the match as an Assassin.

Riot needs to address this, reduce the power reliance on ganking other lanes, and instead change their kit so that they are more about outplaying their opponent, than they are about simply facerolling into botlane. Nothing is worse than an Assassin that goes even (or god-forbid, is behind) their laner, as they then become the most useless character in the game.

As someoen who has like 900k on the champ I'd like to say that what the people commenting here cant seem to get is that Talon's playstyle can literally be summarized in : Do you have R? If yes all in, if no stay back. He is so reliant on his passive to deal any dmg that he ends up being completely useless against anything with any form of mobility (or cc for that matter) without his R. A typical no r Talon fight goes something like : Throw a W, hit the first half, the enemy dodges the second half, congratulations you have done your part and now have no follow up dmg so just walk back and try against next W. Talon is by no means weak, but some parts of his kit feel very unhealthy , very linear and very frustrating. He needs his passive dmg redistributed around his kit IMO.

Imo, the biggest problem with him is that he is very powerful Early-Mid Game, while his Late Game he either snowballs and finishes the game or he is equal to the opponents, meaning that he hasn't bullied his opponents enough.

The only way he can be changed is by making him less oppresive Early by decreasing Base Damage on his abilities and increase his scalings to even out in Mid-Game and buff his Late. Another option would be to nerf his E at first levels and compensate his lack of safety with better Damage later into the game.

I would like to see a decent buff to his W damage, but reduce the rate at which it returns. This would let him clear waves a bit better and give him synergy when ganking allies with hard CC, which makes sense to me since he is the super roam heavy assassin.

It would also boost his jungle clear a bit which would open up jg talon some more.

Personally I feel like too often Talon simply lacks the damage even with a full combo, and when he doesn't his combo comes out too fast and unavoidably to feel interactive. By bumping his W damage up but reducing the return rate it increases his max damage output while giving non-mobile enemies a bit more of a chance to avoid part of it. It also makes him take longer to get his passive bleed off if he wasn't already close enough for ult to hit on activation.

Note that I am not talking about a huge increase in delay, more in the .1-.3 second range. In return maybe 20-30% increased W damage.

To build off some other ideas in this thread: Faster E travel speed but requires 2 seconds out of combat or has a significantly reduced in combat travel speed.

Honestly I feel like a lot of roamers have been getting steadily gimped since season 5. I remember when having the top laner rotate bot 1-2 times by the end of laning phase was common, but shortened game/laning times means fewer chances to roam, TP nerfs hurt roamers, and now the minion speed changes punish it even more. Now I basically never see anyone roam cross map because the penalties are too high. Top and Bot lane might as well be in different games until grouping starts.

Just did a bunch of high elo (D1+) duoing with a Talon main. Not a single game did he not pop off.

I personally don't see the "weak" situations.

1. Talon should have poor waveclear and he shouldnt be able to buy a Tiamat and automatically have that weakness of him completely mitigated;

2)Assassins should have stronger All-ins based on skill expression and landing abilities correctly. However they should have higher cooldowns, so they cant rinse and repeat their engages with close to no risk whatsoever.

3)Assassins should be allowed to Roam, but the decision to Roam should come with costs too, may that be in losing cs or tower damage. However I have already suggestion a change on the Runes, to rework Water Walking into a more "Faster Roaming on rivers" To facilitate that.

4)The whole class should be heavy skill expressive, that being said assassins do need to be feast and famine champions. However if you are competent with them, then there should be more consistency in positive streaks and wins if you have mastered them. However a person that is fairly new to them, should not be given a easy way out or easy tools to go on a rampage.

5)Every class, every champion needs to have clear strengths and weaknesses. These CAN'T be dissipated by items, level ups or even base stats, only slightly mitigated in later stages. Instead a player should take advantage of a champion strength and play around it, while working around the weaknesses that he has. Thus there should also be creative tools to allow players to have possibilities and chances. This creative tools could come from a better itemization.

6)Lethality values need to be nerfed and its itemization could need a few more creative items.

7)Sadly Riot has no intent to reflect on the current state of the game and each champion, and they are too lazy and isolated that they refuse to listen to feedback or ask for it and apply it.

Not a talon main, but I've been playing him a bit (mostly inspired by Yamikaze tbh, I like how he explains his plays) and feel like I should give my 2 cents. What I find fun about talon is his early game power. Thats not to say I think he's healthy, after all he can't do much if he falls behind and there are better assassins for lategame. But I like how you can make flashy plays as early as lvl 2. I also think that early kill threat is important for players who have to deal with strong scaling champs, because it gives them a chance to get ahead and close the game before they get outscaled. Honestly I'd say the best way to improve talon, and yes this would technically be a buff, would be to give his abilities a bonus at max rank to deal with tankier champs. Though making his W travel time faster could help too. I just think the fun of talon comes from his early game, and I'd hate to lose that just to maybe have a better lategame.

"[Assassin] is a polarized champ, too strong in some situations, too linear/weak otherwise." Yes, welcome to assassins (and honestly numerous non assassins in League atm sadly). This is why assassins are bad for pvp games. But some people want to play them and live out the fantasy they imply. So games have them, because capitalist culture says you need as many customers as possible, not as many as result in the most fun game for the majority of its players.

Assassins have to have this binary aspect in order to be effective assassins. If they don't need to get kills and build damage items to do well, they can win without playing like assassins and that's how you end up with stuff like tank fizz and stop actually being an assassin.

If an assassin in a pvp game is balanced particularly well this state of having to be somewhat binary is at its lowest level possible while still being true enough that getting kills and snowballing by building damage is that character's most effective strategy to win games. So if your complaints are valid (and for the sake of my post I'll assume they are as I have no idea if they are or not) the real problem is the degree to which Talon is binary, not simply that he is binary.

I suggest keeping this in mind when making suggestions about possible changes to him. It seems your vague suggestions in your opening post already work well enough in this regard as is, but even as the conversation carries forward it's important to keep this in mind.