Nidalee really needs some help

I don't think Nidalee is in a good spot right now.

Her basic play pattern has more or less always been "land long range Q, watch them shit their pants". Clean up with kitty, win poke wars because she can heal (and it's not bad for breaking turrets either, but). In theory, she has a really nice kit, but in practice I feel it falls short of being playable.

She is ultimately dependent on landing her Q to do much of anything against other champions. Now, it used to have a much bigger hitbox (think Morgana's Dark Binding if memory serves...). Due to the insane damage at long range that got nerfed, and it's much narrower now. The speed of the spear has been tweaked endlessly as well (I can't honestly say where it currently is compared to the past). But the net effect is that it's effectively impossible to land against someone who can see you. There is no amount of skill that will let you land it reliably at any distance; you are entirely dependent on the opponent not avoiding it (unless you're so close they have no time to, at which point it's not very scary anyways). This reliance on landing Q to get in damage severely hurts her ability to fight 1v1 (against a group it's more likely to hit someone just because there's a lot of people moving around, but you aren't going to be able to follow up with pounce a lot of the time in that case).

Frankly, I think it's terrible design for her kit to be so reliant on landing Q for damage but then make landing Q so difficult (and so out of her control). Certainly, making Q easier to land would make her straight up OP as things stand - the scaling and base damage are both extreme and it has a very safe range. The damage would absolutely have to be hit to do this, but I don't think there's any alternative in order for her to have reliability. One of the easiest changes that could be made is to simply have it not hit ranged/caster minions.

This somewhat segues into another symptom. Nidalee is one of the few champions to have been played in every lane and jungle at some point. In her case however, a lot of that I feel is that the changes over the years have forced her out of previous spots. Nerfs to Q pushed her top where she didn't have to face more accurate ranged abilities. Nerfs to healing pushed her out of being a poke support in the vein of Sona. And at the moment I feel she's in the jungle not because she's made for it (though she's certainly been given a lot of help in that regard) but because she can't lane well at all any more, needing the surprise factor of the gank to have any chance of landing a spear to start hurting people.

Now, if she still had some of the old power of her heal she could turtle up in lane and rely on it to win attrition, but she can't both invest in a scary spear and durability.

Another weakness of hers in a prolonged engagement is that she really needs the Hunt debuff to close on someone for her full combo. But as stated; once they can see her landing a spear is just unlikely (and lets not even get started on her traps, which have never been reliable in a fight... which is somewhat okay due to being strong vision but removing the AoE effect was just ridiculous from a lane standpoint... but I digress), and so she has trouble being able to engage with the cat combos.

In the end though, I think Riot really needs to take a look at how she's intended to play and how difficult it is for her to actually accomplish those plays.