Kindred Review & Balance Discussion
Hello everyone I'm a Jungle main at Gold 5, I stopped playing ranked when I got to Gold and started focusing on playing Normal Drafts and Team Builder, prior to this my experience with LoL has been I've been a dedicated player since end of Season 1. Just wanted to clear the air so it would help me explain what I think of Kindred and what I'd like to read from the community about how Riot may balance them. Right now I am almost a level 5 Kindred in Champion Mastery and have carried many games.
I won't go into a lot of detail about Kindred as many of you already know how they perform.
First of all Kindred's design is really awesome, I love the Life and Death theme, Lamb and Wolf make the perfect couple, their animations are smooth and voice work is fantastic. Very cool champion.
Gameplay I'd say Kindred is the most fun I've ever had in the Jungle for a long long time, it's a new playstyle and I love how well it fits and performance in the Jungle compared to lane. Hopping and shooting while kiting the Jungle camps is so much fun and using the spell combo to gank is so rewarding. I have not seen any Kindred player exploit this champion on a solo or duo lane so unlike Rengar's release this champion just only works well in the Jungle so thank you Riot for focusing to keep these 2 in the Jungle 90% of the time.
I'll quickly get into the pros and cons of this champion and then discuss how I feel they are too strong or could need more tweaking.
Pros:
Great Sustain (can clear Jungle without using a HP Pot if you can kite well) Very nice level 4 ganks and duelling potential Balanced Ultimate (Yes I mean this, it isn't just press button and win type of move you can mess up the timing a lot if you aren't paying full attention) Can carry like a real marksman HUGE level 6 - 8 Objective control (can hop into Dragon pit solo and hop out in literally 20 seconds with no severe damage taken) Full Armor Pen Build is VERY strong (42 Armor Pen, 39% Ignore Armor AND Black Cleaver is so good try it out! Trust me!)
Cons: Very weak early game resistance and health (counter jungle hurts a lot) Relies on W and Q spam to keep up with champions (330 Movement Speed, Boots only gives up to 370) Stacks can be too far to reach in the Jungle (especially since this meta doesn't reward counter jungling at the moment) Can't escape from fights easily (especially early to mid game)
I'm really curious on how Riot will nerf Kindred because a lot of the pros I've pointed out are really scary maybe not on the pro scene but in the average MMR a lot of average players don't seem to find many ways to stop Kindred when they're rolling. I am thinking what Riot may have to do at first is nerf the passive damage, once I had 15 Stacks and even with that little it was wrecking players hard, I'd also say less damage on their E all though a part of me will be sad about this since the E really makes all that time hopping towards your target and burning flash to get the last hit more rewarding that if they nerfed E they'd have to give Kindred more movement speed to compensate.
In my opinion I want Kindred to be nerfed because I want Kindred to be less of a relied carry Jungler and more of a skilful and smart picked Jungler but I really don't want Riot to remove Kindreds sustain or early game ganking potential to hard as I feel this would totally ruin them and not be fun to play at all.
Please comment below your experiences with Kindred and if there's anything you'd suggest as well.
