shen's quality of life and where riot "missed the mark"
disclaimer: this is not an argument about shen's viability at the time of typing up this post.
so it's been a little over 8 months since shen received his rework, and i agree that riot "missed the mark" with the update.
he's certainly in a good spot right now. there's no question that riot solved many of the problems that kept old shen from being a healthy champion. these problems included:
-being highly and easily sustainable in lane -being able to whittle down opponents in lane without giving them much of an opportunity to respond due to ranged point and click poke -eventually being able to push an enemy out of a lane and assist another lane without losing much lane pressure -having a w that was essentially unusable outside of getting his old passive up sooner
these are problems that shen has had through much of his history, so it was very important to nip them in the bud in one fell swoop. ultimately, the rework gave:
-shen the ability to make more meaningful decisions when his ult was down other than "taunt them or be useless" -the ability for opponents to react to his trades instead of being poked endlessly with his old q until they were forced to back -the ability to push shen out of lane without playing one of his hard counters (due to the removal of his inbuilt sustain)
he also got a new tool to play around with: his spirit blade
conceptually speaking, this was a cool experiment on riot's part. one can tell that they really tried to hit home with the ninja archetype and the protector of the equilibrium, but i feel as though it didn't translate well functionally speaking. it turned out to be very clunky and it feels it though it doesn't flow with the rest of his kit in a way that makes sense with what shen is picked for.
the biggest problem, in my opinion, lies within the way his q works. here's the description below, for your reference:
Q: Twilight Assault Shen calls his spirit blade, empowering his next three basic attacks to deal damage based on a portion of his target’s max health. If his spirit blade collides with an enemy champion on its way to him, Shen deals increased damage and gains greatly increased attack speed. All enemies struck by the returning blade briefly suffer reduced movement speed when moving away from Shen.
the expectation from reading the description alone is that when you press q, your next three autos will deal bonus damage. for clarity's sake, it should probably be mentioned that the empowered autos take place after shen's blade reaches him. this is only part of the problem, however. the biggest problem with this ability is that the time it takes the blade to reach shen isn't static. akin to orianna's ball, the travel time is based on distance. this makes sense on orianna. all of orianna's abilities are centered around her ball. her ability to perform her function is based on how she uses the ball. her kit is centered around it.
this is not the same for shen.
half of his active skills aren't influenced by the spirit blade at all. the only reason i can find (this isn't to say that there isn't any other) for the blade functioning is so that his opponents have more time to react to the blade before it passes through them for the slow when running away and the bonus damage on shen's q. if shen need to be nerfed for the travel time to be static regardless of distance, i feel as though that'd be preferable to having the time it takes for you to be able to use your own beneficial effects vary with each use.
tl;dr: normalize the travel time on shen's spirit blade, nerf elsewhere if needed. this will make playing shen feel a lot more smooth
