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My thoughts on nidalee.

Worgslarg·8/9/2014, 12:38:30 PM·2 votes·345 views

As a preface, I would like to encourage discussion in this thread, and I love constructive criticism.

Ever since her gameplay update, nidalee has been seeing a rise in popularity in the toplane. Specifically, AD nidalee, usually building triforce/iceborn gauntlets, perhaps one more damage item ala botrk, and then going tanky.

I attribute her rise in popularity to a few things:

1: Her autoattack harass. She has a 525 autoattack range, and a heal with a large attack speed boost. This allows her to spam auto's in lane, and by dropping creep aggro in bushes and healing any return harass, she has a safe laning phase with imminse harass. This is not very bad in and of itself, but it creates problem number 2.

2: Her takedown's ad scaling. ( Bit of a long point. Currently all her cougar form skills have moderate ap scalings, with takedown having a larger ap scaling. However, takedown has a very high AD scaling. This lends nidalee the ability to assassinate people, with just a triforce and any other high ad item(item 3072 item 3508 item 3031 item 3139 , etc).

3: AP nidalee requires the hunt to compete with similar assassins. AP nidalee is weak compared to many assassins, thus pushing her out of the mid lane. She does not have the gapclose nor burst damage of any other assassin without The Hunt. Landing the hunt on a enemy target is very hard to do with creeps blocking spears, and traps ridiculously long arming time and the fact traps seem to prefer minions to champions.

If she can maintain assassin like damage with 2 damage items, AD nidalee suffers from the same problems that jax and yasuo have. The bruiser nidalee playstyle, is in fact an assassin with defensive items. Meanwhile ap nidalee cannot easily land the hunt in lane, and does not have the autoattack poke to make up for it.

What you get is the intended nidalee playstyle of landing the hunt, and following up in cougar form. In reality, landing the hunt in lane is too hard meaning that ap nidalee falls far short of the bruiser/assassin AD nidalee.

So what can we do about this?

  1. Nerf her ratios. While this does not fix the problems with her kit, her AD scaling is to bursty and too high.

  2. Reduce the AD scaling on takedown by a very large amount ( max of 250% ad down to .. 150%? ), and give swipe and pounce AD scalings to compensate, thus slightly lowering her overall damage while shifting bruiser nid away from the assassin role.

  3. Greatly increase the AP scaling on takedown, and remove/ nerf the ap scalings on pounce and swipe. This would return AP nidalee to the assassin game, increasing her burst so she can compete with other assassins( and ap nid, is an assassin)

  4. Traps now only hit champions, or have a larger aoe, or instantly arm and fire when placed with a champion in the radius. This gives her a bit of reliability when landing the hunt in lane, and allows for her to have consistant numbers, instead of under damage unless her opponent mispositions and eats a spear to the face, where her damage spikes to the level of a normal assassin.

Leave your thoughts in the comments, and if you disagree, please say why,

10 Comments

Knight SoIaire 8/11/2014, 7:57:32 AM2 votes

takedown should scale off bonus ad instead of total ad takedowns damage should be split beetwen magic from ap and physical from ad, you might not find this a problem but you cant get tanky vs nidaele or you have to spend 2x gold to do it, if you get armour she will churn you with skills, if you get mr she will churn you with autos

spear speed should be increased, while spear damage should start from 0 and ramp up, right now nidaele gets insanely rewarded for walking in your face and spearing you at point blank which deals quite good damage and allows her to instakill you

pounce should get range empower afrer getting a kill, her playstyle should be to get a spear from far away, jump in and jump out, the last part should be reward for a kill

w should be made so you can proc it by skillfully casting it under enemy feet

hunt bonus should be reduced to a point where she does not eat tanks so easily, right now its insanely strong bonus to compensate for unreliable spears and traps, this number is so high that ppl dont bother to toss the spear from a far, you dont need the damage from that spear, just the hunt to 100 to 0 aguy in 2 sec

Marthian8/10/2014, 7:58:14 AM1 votes

Something else: Reduce her base AD as well. Most Nids I see build Trinity force or Iceborne Gauntlet, and their sheen effect scales with ad, which is higher than almost every ADC's base AD. In addition, make it so Takedown can't proc on turrets.

Anyways, I agree her ratios should be reduced. Increasing AP ratio on takedown may not be a good idea though due to it's scaling with missing HP. And traps should definitely not trigger immediately if placed under a champion, since it would give her too much reliability, especially since her combo for when you are marked hurts a lot as is.