The Issue with Kha'Zix
This post is a bit lengthy. My proposed changes are further down
Reasoning First off, I think that his current state is not awful, since they essentially gave him the "Zed" treatment. Now there is a decision between the higher risk/reward of maxing W compared to the reliable Q. Additionally, they put a lot of power onto his Evolved Q that is not related to the base Q level, thus making it possible to have a much stronger jungle invade, etc. I also agree that they have put him in a position where there is actual counterplay, but I feel there is a bit too much.
However, the main issue I feel that Riot has not done a sufficient job in managing is the power levels of each of his ability decisions. First, just to look at Kha'Zix in the field of assassins, he has some of the most binary and easy to counter powers. Riot has had a very hard time making stealth feel good, and I think that forced the original damage reduction on his R. The reduction was over tuned, but it did help make his R not feel as bad if he was revealed.
Second, his primary damage bonus (isolation) can be countered entirely by one player. Generally, when an assassin jumps on a mage/adc/support, there generally is a response from one other person to help peel them off (i.e., Rengar/Zed/Talon). However, especially now that there are more mobile adcs, all it takes is one dash or flash to take away a significant amount of burst damage. Additionally, it is very difficult to find an isolated target in a team fight, especially in competitive play. This is the second point where his damage is either enhanced or not; there is no scale.
Third, his W has a small blast radius that can easily be blocked by a person who is peeling for your target.
Other than these issues, his ability evolutions have been surprisingly stale since his release:
- His Evolved Q has always enhanced isolation damage
- His Evolved W has always increased the amount of targets hit
- Evolved E increased mobility and resets
- Evolved R increased his mobility and possibly his passive use
When considering what has been popular since his release, W was originally very strong because it applied unseen predator. However, Riot rightly removed this since it lacked counterplay. The other essentially mandatory evolution has been E, because the reset is so strong. The primary issue, in my opinion, is that evolved E has synergies with the rest of his kit (jumping from stealth multiple times) or diving in, assassinating, and bailing. It also tends to make it very easy for him to escape as long as he managed to hit a good percentage of the enemy team via his jump or W (this is worsened by evolved W). A separate issue is that this also supports a feast/famine part of his kit. He's either getting resets or he is stranded and slaughtered. This puts him in a position where he either needs to be able to solo a non-isolated target, or his team is already ahead in the fight.
Meanwhile, his W has always had a weird usage. It slows and reveals; The reveal is not very useful most of the time, and he has a slow on his passive and a speed boost on his ult. So the reason to take evolved W is to increase poke, a generally lackluster gameplay area. The usage case for his W does not make sense with the direction that Riot is pointing him in, as an assassin. It either slows and reveals the front line or he has no reason to use it since he can R --> AA his target.
Changes So my primary suggestion is to change up the power levels of his W and E evolutions. Currently, there are very few occasions where you wouldn't evolve Q,E, and R since they add to his assassination power. These changes are meant in the short-term to increase Kha'Zix's skill cap and counterplay. So here are my theoretical changes:
Evolved W: No longer 3 missiles (maybe one larger missile?); Now instead of revealing, it marks all targets hit; When a marked target takes damage, Kha'Zix's cooldowns are reduced by 3 seconds (excluding R) and the mark disappears; Marked targets are treated as isolated.
Evolved E: CD is now reduced to 9 seconds (obviously this # is a filler); range still the same
The changes to W allow for Kha'Zix to either be able to get a good deal of damage off on a priority target, or to be able to do some damage to a frontline that normally laughs at his low non-isolation damage. The E change is to reflect that he doesn't necessarily need to be outright massacring the enemy team in order to do well, and helps deal with his feast scenario. One of the ideas I played with was that procing the mark reduced the cooldown between casts of his R, but I didn't know if this would be unhealthy given how hard it is to balance stealth.
My hope with these changes is that those who want to be more mobile will opt for either QER or WER, while those who want more burst will opt for QWR or QWE.
Hopefully, the evolution options go from QER --> all possible combinations.
I guess the final thing I want to say is that I do not feel that these solve all of his problems, but I wanted to say my piece and hopefully rouse some community discussion given how cool of a champ Kha'Zix is and how much potential he has. Thank you to those who read through this long post, and I would appreciate any brainstorming.
Nalitus
