The mess of a problem that is Kindred.

Firstly, I'd like to say that her theme and lore are one of the best in my opinion. They are one of my favorite champions based on theme alone, with the portrayal of being spooky hunters.

In game however, this is a completely different story.

Personally I don't understand Riot's insistence on locking so much of Kindred's power budget behind their marks, despite the fact that it's very easy for the enemy jungler and/or team to take advantage of Kindred's low base stats, thus ensuring that Kindred can't contest marked camps unless their team is with them, which is unlikely. Her mark is by itself an indicator screaming "I'm going to invade your jungle at this camp" and being a weak early marksman feels terrible when you can't really outduel any jungler in the early game, the risk is far too high for the reward.

Secondly, crit itemization is the most expensive thing to build, especially if you're in a low-income situation. If you want to build crit, you should be a laner - not a jungler. The one jungler who usually builds crit is , and he relies on farming very fast and splitpushing, which Kindred doesn't want to do. Even then he is a pretty cheesy pick. They are, by far, the best definition of "feast or famine". You don't eliminate feast & famine by moving Kindred's scaling from marks to crit. I never got what reasoning they had behind that change. Kindred went from needing marks to needing marks and gold.

The marks were a much better way of letting Kindred scale without having to build multiplicative items, they could build items which fit a jungler. The problem is rather that once you fall behind in marks, it gets pretty hard to ever get any marks at all. Unlike normal champions who can scale up if they successfully stall, Kindred easily just remains weak all game if they fall behind early. If the marks are gonna work, there should be some kind of cushion, a minimum amount of marks they can get without being in too much risk.

tl;dr: The rework did nothing to address the champions feast or famine problem. A champ that is reliant on a RNG stacking passive just doesn't work and if that champs balance is 100% based on if its strong enough to fight for stacks that's not gonna work either, especially if they're being pushed to build crit.

SOLUTIONS

Here are what I propose for some changes to Kindred:

• Add an interaction with their marked champion. Similar to and his villain, and his blood hunt and and his isolation, Kindred should have some interaction with his marked target such as increased damage or damage reduction from that target. That way, it allows Kindred to be able to 1v1 a champ in the early game whilst also considering WHO he wants to mark due to the cooldown between hunts and it also allows them to gain marks without having to rely on the mark RNG itself.

• Get rid of the global mark symbol on the minimap or make it so that the enemy needs vision of the camp to know if it's marked.
  If an enemy player finds a jungle monster that's Marked, they can attempt to kill it while risking encountering Kindred. Their enemies should NOT know exactly where they're going. To that extent, Kindred could also have x seconds knowing what jungle camps are marked before the enemy team does.

• Make all possible camps marked, you get half a stack for your own jungle camps and give a longer cooldown between hunts to keep it balanced. For example, have both scuttle crabs, and raptors marked at the beginning of the game. Then have the marks refresh every 3-4 min. It makes it easy to get the early marks necessary, but the difficulty of getting higher marks stays the same (killing enemy buffs, drag, etc.). It also means if Kindred is terribly behind, they can just power farm their own jungle to slowly stack and remain relevant

• Make them a laner. It's quite possible marksmen just shouldn't jungle at all and that whole concept is a failed experiment.

Thoughts and Opinions?