Why Shelve Kindred Buffs?

I know people like to say Kindred's op when ahead, but unless you have an extremely good matchup there's no reason for you to ever GET ahead. Kindred is like Kayn in that you need to have a good early game to snowball, but Kayn at least has Rhaast to fall back on, in addition to being able to gank very well with shadow step. Kindred... has farming ENEMY jungle to fall back on, which you can't do anyway if you're behind because you can't fight the enemy jungler if you're behind as Kindred. Not only that, Kindred's actual ganking strength(your only other way to get marks) isn't very high, as not only is your target access fairly low(your only way to get onto a target is q, and your only way to keep a target in range is e, which you ideally want to use later in a fight since it does missing hp damage.) Kindred, much like Akali, has a sort of semi-duelist kit, that focuses on mid-length fights, but you don't really have a way to keep targets from running beyond a 1 second slow. You don't have the damage to kill them before they run, and you don't have enough cc to really prevent them from running, but you also don't have the strength to kill them as they run(if they run immediately, rather than when they get low, your e won't do much damage, especially early, and your damage isn't very high.) Most of your output comes from getting in a lot of autoattacks and then using e to execute, but: E execute is at an extremely low threshold if you don't build crit: 15% percent HP is lower than PANTHEON Q, and Pantheon doesn't really rely heavily on the execute to begin with, while on Kindred you almost always need the damage, which is only even reliable if you build crit, but crit itself isn't good until lategame, so: If you build crit, you have weak early and need to be really lucky to snowball, but if you DON'T build crit, then your execute is weaker(50% increased damage is quite significant) so your abilities are less reliable if you don't have marks, thus giving you a weak early.

But then Kindred doesn't really have a strong lategame either. Lategame Kindred is basically just Vayne but without the true damage, and with attack speed instead of raw damage. You ideally want to stay in a fight, but with damage creep you'll almost always die before you can stay in a fight long enough to do real damage, and even if you do ult you aren't the only champion that can pull off the whole "kill them right when the invincibility ends" by a long shot. If you know how to play against Kindred, there isn't a ton they can do, when: If the laner you mark doesn't overextend you'll have a hard time trying to kill them unless you're very far ahead(while tower dive then ult SOUNDS nice, against anyone with hard cc that isn't going to work). If enemy laners aren't severely behind and don't overextend it will be extremely difficult to get marks off of champions, and if the enemy team wards marks or has efficient clear(and/or knows which marks spawn when), OR their jungler is strong/ahead, you can't invade the enemy jungle for marks.

Kindred is a champion that's built to have heavy snowball, but unlike most junglers doesn't have enough consistency to actually start snowballing. Yi, for example, is strong when ahead because he scales well with items(and is bursty, fast, and hard to kill), and can thus start racking up kills to begin with. Veigar, Nasus, or Swain, on the other hand, can make effective use of their scaling mechanics because they can obtain stacks so long as they land a given ability. Kindred, on the other hand, needs to gank and get takedowns, or invade enemy jungle, both of which are preventable, as she doesn't have the ganking strength/target access of champions like Kayn, Kha'Zix, Rengar, or Evelynn, and doesn't have the strength to bully the enemy jungler off of camps like certain other junglers. The only times Kindred consistently does well are when A: Enemy team doesn't know how to play against Kindred(which isn't Kindred being strong, it's the enemy team deciding to not use easily available information(in the duration of loading screen, it's fairly easy to do a quick google search about one or two enemy champions) or B: If you get early kills(usually just the enemy team doing very poorly early, having a successful early invade(which tends to depend on enemy botlane/midlane and your laners), or being against immobile squishies(Xerath, Karthus.)) While I'd like to say Varus is in this category as well, he can poke you from a distance until you have marks, meaning you aren't good against him early, and thus can't use him to snowball until midgame or later(by which point you typically need to already be snowballing)