Why Shaco should not be buffed.

Hello!

So i have over the least few days seen a lot of posts and even comments requesting buffs and claiming that he is much too weak and that the update under the assassin rework was unjustified and that he was balanced before that happened.

I wish to express my disagreement with this post and explain why i feel so.

The problem has, and had even before his rework, is the fact that his powerbudget is completely skrewed, and this is caused by him essentially having no meaningful counterplay or skill expression.

Normally the more counterplay a champion has the greater the power they can afford to pump into their kits, a good example here would be ,,,,,perhaps , or a highly skillshot reliant mage like or i suppose.

Champions that have to fulfill some manner of conditions for them do succeed and do what they want to do, which is generally damage, but the budget can also be spent on other things like defensive tools or other stuff like utility, mobility, CC or something else like W for instance.

And that is what lacks, he has no real conditions for his damage and i´ll break it down as simply as i can.

Passive is a damage boost on a auto when attacking from behind on a 3 seconds cooldown. Q is a blink that makes him go invisible for a few seconds once maxed, also damage booster.

W is like a Zyra plant with shorter range, more health and hard CC as well as the ability to act like a trap by being invisible and only appearing to hit someone passing by.

E has a passive and active, the passive is that his autos slow targets while the active is on cooldown, the active is a targeted ranged skill that applies a slow and does damage which scales of missing enemy health.

R makes him vanish for a second before he and a identical clone appears at the spot, the clone does reduced damage but it can explode upon death doing some damage and leaving behind 3 boxes that share a healthpool.

is a jungler, so his main way of dealing damage and ganking is to Q towards his enemy from a place they cant see, run up behind them while invisible and start stabbing them+ throwing down a box and his E to stop them from running while avoiding any retaliation with his R if needed.

This basically gives the enemy no chance to react to him, no way to even avoid or reduce his damage once he appears and one cant even turn on him. Too many of these good tools combined with front loaded unavoidable damage results in, as mentioned, a poor powerbudget.

As poor as a medieval countryside church mice basically

He pays the price by having barely any base damage, barely any invisibility at earlier ranks and his R is pretty lame too. However he still cant be buffed because if these tools arent terrible and if he has the base damage then he quickly becomes the lord murder clown of the rift that almost no one can do anything about and no carry can escape from him.

I recall people hating him as much as they did back in season 3 because of this kind of stuff.

This is why in my opinion he cannot get anything but very minor buffs, and why he needs a VGU, he needs to have counterplay added in for a better powerbudget, he needs a more focused and coherent identity+kit benefiting of a assassin rather than this pretty random mess he has and finally he needs a visual update.

TL;DR

A champions powerbudget for theit kit is decided by how much counterplay they have, basically has little to none combined with too many good tools which ends up completely screwing his power economy over becoming dirt poor and destitute. He needs a VGU to fix this .....and he also needs new visuals, a fancy new look rarely goes wrong.

Feel free to vote in the poll and comment if so desired.

Thanks for reading!