Why is Cassiopeia really being reworked?

Riot gives the goals of increasing her reliability and toning down her lane bullying as the reasons that they are reworking Cassiopeia, but the truth is she isn’t bullying anyone in lane (she’s some of the tastiest gank-bait out there) and her current rework only makes her MORE hit-or-miss by making Noxious Blast more difficult to land while punishing you even harder for missing it by pushing her power into her Twin Fang (a spell that is useless if you can’t hit your Q in the first place), not to mention in the cases where you can’t follow up your Q with multiple Es you’ve done vastly less damage!

The question is, what does her current rework actually accomplish? Primarily, they’ve made her completely useless until super late game. What does that tell us about Riot’s intentions?

It crushes her ability to compete on all non-Summoner’s Rift maps. Late game hypercarries are universally bad on Twisted Treeline, Crystal Scar, and Howling abyss due to the short games times and general lack of ability to farm. By nuking her early/mid game from orbit they’ve managed to avoid spending any real mindshare trying to balance her for these game modes. This is a clear goal of Riot’s with the rework as they had made multiple map-specific nerfs to her recently and even stated that she is difficult to balance on non-SR maps.

Riot has developed a history of eliminating “out of the ordinary” champions every time they rise up and it looks like now they are gunning for the outcasts even outside of Summoner’s Rift. For many others, and myself the most fun part of URF mode was seeing underused champs like Skarner, Hecarim, Urgot, and Taric rise up from the ashes and stomp their unsuspecting opponents. Once Riot finishes off Cassiopeia they can breathe a sigh of relief because finally Twisted Treeline will be dominated by the usual suspects such as Ziggs, Syndra, Oriana, Morgana, and Lulu.