What's the deal with playing Kindred

Now as a heads up, the following is from another player & I've copied & pasted it into this thread. I'm a 500k+ Kinidred main - my personal opinions quick: I feel as though Kindred has lost her identity, the mini rework from a ways back did what it could to settle the onslaught of complaints about how the champion got nerfed to the ground. Now my aim isn't to reignite that kind of barrage of complaints, but I feel incredibly weak playing as Kindred; where she is supposed to scale, she instead falls off. I recently played a game where I attained 21k in Gold, had over 18 stacks with 30 kills & did 92K damage overall to champions (300k damage otherwise) in a single game. I had my build finished early but we actually ended up losing. Now I'm not saying that even when ultra fed you can't lose but I barely made stupid mistakes, I had 8 deaths by the end of the game & I gather that would give the enemy team an edge in shut down gold but not enough to the point where I feel utterly useless & completely lack lustre. There is no incentive to get marks other than to stay relevant & I didn't even feel relevant in the late game after gaining an above average number of marks, it's a task in itself - requiring teamwork & map good awareness, whereas champions like Veigar/Nasus endlessly stack with ease & are definitely nightmares in the late game no doubt. Kindred's main use as a tank destroyer isn't even viable, her kit is now crit heavy leaving no options for much else & her W max health damage contradicts with her whole idea of gaining range as it doesn't even scale in range itself, but I'll leave that for the in depth post below... Please take a look & really understand where this is all coming from.

Link for original thread: https://boards.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/gameplay-balance/5A8Bz8dX-kindreds-passive

Name of summoner this reply belongs to - Yago (NA): Here's what they had to say...

During Season 6 I was one of the better Kindred players in NA, and played exclusively Kindred ADC/Mid. I was as much of a one-trick pony as someone can be. At a certain point in the season, I believe it was somewhere around March of that year, I was Platinum 3 promo-series into Platinum 2 with somewhere around Platinum I / Diamond V MMR and an 80% winrate with Kindred, though I might have the time frame mixed up a bit--it's been awhile. At the time, Kindred was disgustingly overpowered. I knew it, even though they weren't very popular, and I knew how to abuse it. Sometimes I'd get a complaint about the pick and I'd just link my op.gg and they'd see my stats and leave me alone. If I'd been given more time, I'd have made it to Diamond. You don't have to believe it, if you don't want to. It makes no difference to me. But you can look up some of the summoners I was playing with around that time, and you'll see a large percentage of them did, in fact, make it there.

Anyways, Kindred got popular, especially in Challenger, Master, and Diamond. It started getting harder and harder to play them through the bans, and I struggled as a result. I expanded my champion pool from one to two, including pre-rework Urgot. Then the nerfs started. I shrugged it off, for the most part. I knew they needed to be nerfed, and I was just happy I'd be able to actually be able to play them again. My win percentage dropped to about 60-65%, but I was still climbing, even if much slower. Unfortunately, people stopped taking me seriously. It felt like almost every single game I'd get asked if I read the patch notes. I'd say yes. Then I'd get flamed for picking the champion anyways. If they didn't mind the champion pick, I'd get flamed for the role I took them to. I'd have junglers follow me around and smite my Marks to sabotage me. I'd have supports refuse to play with me. And I stopped taking myself seriously. If I was playing League, I was playing on tilt. It gets hard not to personalize the horrible things people spew at you, and quite frankly, my personal life was falling to pieces at the same time.

At the very start of S7, ADC were pretty weak. So I chose to avoid the ADC role, and my favorite champion for awhile. By the time the meta had stabilized enough for me to feel comfortable switching back to ADC Kindred, Kindred's rework hit.

And it hit hard. So hard, I don't play the champion anymore, and I try to stay out of Kindred discussions because every time I get into one I leave angry. It's not that I don't want to play them. It's not that I'm upset I didn't hit or that I can't hit Diamond...

It's just the champion isn't the same.

I used to be able to build almost whatever I wanted: Iceborn. Spirit Visage. Blade of the Ruined King. Infinity Edge. Essence Reaver. Muramana. Death's Dance. Black Cleaver. Wit's End. Guinsoo's Rageblade. Frozen Mallet. Trinity Force. Even Zhonya's Hourglass.

It was versatile. But you can't do that anymore.

You have to build the same items every game now with almost no room for variance.

I used to FEEL like death. If you got the Marks, you were able to kill anyone you caught out alone. You were a powerhouse in teamfights. Now? Even if you do get the gold, and the Marks, what do you get out of it? You have no way to deal significant AoE damage, since the Runaan's Hurricane synergy is gone. Your single target damage is far less damage than a proper ADC would do. Your supposed damage steroid, the bonus attack speed, is hardly worth anything. After all, Kindred's Q is an auto-attack reset. It also has a fixed animation time, like Vayne's Tumble, which means that once you hit a certain point, you end up either losing damage by using the spell or you waste the attack speed to adjust your position. Even ignoring that, though, she has no reason to care about that kind of attack speed, like Kog'maw (Bio-Arcane Barrage) or Vayne (Silver Botls) or Xayah (Bladecaller) or Caitlyn (Headshot) do. I'm pretty certain Kennen does as much or more damage with his basic attacks than Kindred does with the same build, because he has higher base AD, far higher base AS and AS/level, and his W.

'But what about the range!?' Well, your ultimate encourages people to come in close, at which point your range is useless. Your W radius doesn't scale like your attack range does, so when you try and use it the enemy will be at the edge and just walk out of it immediately. Unless, of course, you get up close which defeats the purpose of the range. Again. Oh, and then there's the fact that Twitch, Kog'maw, Tristana, Caitlyn, and Jinx ALL end up with or start out with BETTER RANGE than you'll probably ever reasonably achieve, even in a game where you're ahead...and every single one of those champions have additional steroids other than just their range, AND most of them have spells that are stronger and have far more utility than Kindred does.

'But Kindred can jungle!' First off: So can Twitch and Ezreal, and both of those do a lot more early damage than Kindred does. Second: It isn't 'But Kindred CAN jungle!' it's 'Kindred is FORCED to jungle.' Which actually further hurts the champion, because it starves her of the gold she wants AND ruins your team composition! A 2 for 1 special! This was less of an issue before, because A. She dealt damage even if she didn't build damage: This gave her a fallback option if things weren't going well, and offer some frontline potential. B. She was actually relevant early, which made it less of an issue to pick such a selfish champion. Seriously, if you want to play Kindred jungle, don't. Take Zac, or Sejuani, Jarvan IV, or Warwick. Watch as you carry the game without having to hunt for Marks! Be threatening starting at level 2! Enjoy your (multiple) crowd control abilities, and similar or better damage! Play from behind by protecting your teammates, rather than tickling your enemies!

If Jungle is so bad, what about lane Kindred? Also ruined by the rework! Wolf's Frenzy used to deal almost as much damage, or more, as a basic attack at level 1. You could use this to basic attack an enemy, hit W, and force a trade or zone them off of the wave. This was especially useful in bottom lane, because if the first champion left the radius, it would automatically switch to the other one. Now its damage is less than it used to be, even counting the 1.5% Current Health damage, because they removed the .4 Total AD ratio in place of a pathetic .2 Bonus AD ratio! Keep in mind it wasn't amazing in lane before, it was merely what made them functional there. And if you try and leave lane to go get your Marks, unlike before, their gold value is absolutely awful in comparison to just staying in the lane!

Seriously, go ahead and compare the values of a Mark before and a Mark now. You used to gain 1.25% Current HP damage On-Hit, .5% Current HP damage per hit of W, and 5 damage on Q. Now you gain 5% Attack Speed, 1% Current HP damage per hit of W, and .5% Missing HP damage on your E.

That might not seem TOO bad of a loss at first...until you realize that the On-Hit damage had a minimum value of 8 PER MARK, which is actually HIGHER than 1.25% Current HP damage anytime the target has < 640 HP, which is pretty often for a decent chunk of the game...and that Kindred's Q is an auto-attack reset, which synergized with the On-Hit damage...and that triggering Kindred's E damage would require 3 applications of that On-Hit damage...and then it's apparent that the only ability that you have ANY sort of real significant 'improvement' to now, compared to before, is W. And it's still strictly worse than what you would have gotten before.

Also, why does her slow, the ability you use to START a fight, do more damage the LOWER the target's health is? That's the OPPOSITE of synergy. They even increased the missile speed of the attack, which actually makes it even harder to use it to execute low health targets just after Lamb's Respite ends. And what's with the percent missing health damage on her E being generally way worse than the old maximum health damage on it? Seriously, your target has to be missing more than 60% of their HP before it does more damage now than it did before. If you manage to get into late game, it can put out some seriously high damage, but I promise you it isn't much more than you could have dealt before. And so much of that damage is literally wasted on overkill, anyways.

Riot shoehorned in a bunch of 'features' that are counter-intuitive to the way the champion is played. They're not very good in the jungle, they're not very good in a lane, and even if they WERE no amount of raw numerical strength is going to make them feel good to play when half of their kit renders the other half of their kit useless or awkward at best.

So, IDK, what's REALLY the point in picking Kindred? What's the point in anything in their kit, anymore? They're down to Shaco status. You know, where they don't REALLY bring anything that significant, but the few dedicated mains can make it work. But who really wants that for their champion? Who wants to sit there and master a champion with the knowledge that anything they could do on that champion could be done better and more easily on another? I thought about being one of those people, who keeps trying. But every time I try, I just get frustrated and angry and tilt off the face of the earth. How can I not be, when every single feature of the champion that I liked was tossed aside and replaced with things I don't care about, and then left to rot there?