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The state of Evelynn's Kit and Hybrid Champs

Linna Excel·3/5/2014, 2:35:28 AM·3 votes·1,293 views

Evelynn is in kind of a bad state right now. Part of the problem is her kit (her passive is a discussion in itself). Half of her damage is physical and half is magical. For some champs, this wouldn't be a problem, but for an assassin, it is very much a problem.

First is do you build AD or AP? Hybrid items suck (getting back to that). Most players have to choose either/or. Evelynn, I don't think she can.

One of biggest issues with hybrids right now has to do with penetration. There aren't any good penetration items for hybrid champs. First off you'd need both a void staff and a last whisper. Getting both of those on the same champ, unless that champ had insane base damage, isn't going to work out. Neither offers much damage by themselves.

Percent penetration when you aren't scaling that well doesn't work too well when the champ you are laning against is getting 250 armor and 250 mr and bought a bork. Even with 33% penetration that's still 60% damage reduction as well as a lot of health gain.

Evelynn needs both kinds of penetration for her kit to work but as it stands, I don't think she can build either kind. The penetration items don't offer much in the way of stats. Gunblade sucks, can't buy that. TF is nice, but doesn't offer a lot of any one thing. It needs you to build AD for the proc benefit as well. It almost wants you to build raw AD.

Evelynn needs to build AP and speed items for her Q to kite with. Her E needs an all in built and tank. Her W doesn't do anything for damage directly. Her R is limited in usefulness and it gets worse the later in a fight you decide to use it. It wants you to initiate when assassins are generally clean up. Katarina is a good example of this. Your team gets the other team low and she jumps in and ults. Evelynn's passive has limited use in a fight once she's engaged. It's nice when you want to avoid a ward, but when you are actually fighting it's not much help.

So basically her bloody kit is all over the place.

While I'm focusing my discussion on Evelynn, building hybrid in general is something you can't do very effectively right now. Kayle only builds AP. Akili isn't that popular. Kog usually only builds AD. MF and Irelia have AP scaling, but you never build them hybrid, it just sucks on them. Katarina only builds AP. Yi got nerfed so he can't build AP anymore. Because of the way being a DD works in the league now, you have to have penetration to have any hope of dealing with a tank. Most hybrid champs are DDs. Just by going hybrid, you tend to be hurting one stat or the other and then there's the problem of penetration. You can't justify both. If you do get both items, you've gimped your build so hard because you don't have the numbers to take advantage of the penetration. If you build neither, you aren't going to get through the 80% resistance the enemy's tank just built and your ult just bounced off of him. Most tanks won't even feel a loss of 5% tops of their health.

For an effective DD you almost need 500 points or more in one of your damage stats and 40% penetration. Eve is a DD but she can't really build like she needs to because of the way her kit is pulling her apart.

Itemization for the league really needs a bit of help, particularly for hybrid champs.

7 Comments

Solanar3/5/2014, 2:39:50 PM3 votes

I play Evelynn AD now as well and she is still a great assassin. Her Passive allows her to skirt around enemies and then jump in with a surprise gank with her W. At first I thought changing her E to physical was going to destroy her, but I actually like it a lot now. She is stronger Early game because enemies usually have less armor than Magic resist early game, allowing her to do more damage. DFG was her main damage item before, but it can be replaced with BotRK for the same effect, plus a slow.

Since Evelynn benefits from both AD and AP, she can be built in a variety of ways, which is great because you can play her differently every game depending on what the game needs. If you need a tank, she can be tanky. If you need more AP damage, she can build Deathcap and Zhonyas. If you need more AD, you can build Triforce and BotRK. I personally love that Evelynn is Hybrid because she can be so versatile and I hope Riot never changes it.

JackAqua3/5/2014, 4:44:54 AM2 votes

I simply play her AD-ish now, and I'm just as assasin-y than before.
Get Manamune and Black Cleaver and you'll find yourself doing quite a bit of damage with your E.

Earl Eulrich3/5/2014, 11:58:11 AM1 votes

The thing is...her goal usually is to get to the backline and kill the carries - which usually don´t build too much defensive stats. Also she´s not a real assassin as she don´t has that jump around+ burst pattern....much more a running interference + dps, which is why you´ll often see her build quite tanky so she can dps sth. without getting exploded.

And the dps-part is true for most hybrids, they all have high base-dps and scalings to stay relevant without building too much penetration (e.g. jax, kayle (though she has her passive), teemo...even akali if build that way).

AbiwonKenabi3/5/2014, 8:21:01 PM1 votes

You write her passive off like it's no good, but it's invaluable for the whole game: vision is super important in League, and her passive makes her immune to most vision devices, more-so now that pink wards are no longer stealthed (getting destroyed with ease). How many times have you gotten ganked hard, or an enemy got around behind you during a teamfight, and after you were like, "Gee, I wish I had warded to prevent that." Well, warding is that much harder with Evelynn's passive, as most wont see her. This is true no matter how she builds.

That said, I find that Evelynn has a lot of options in terms of item builds. She can still build AP ok, she can build AD well, but I think right now she benefits most from a slightly tanky build: take a Raduin's and a Banshees with maybe a BotRK somewhere in there depending on how much your team needs damage vs tank. A flexible build like this is great, especially in solo queue when you have no idea who is going to struggle and who's going to do well.

Finally, Evelynn is strong in the jungle right now. She can clear camps very quickly, and her W has no mana cost and relatively short cooldown so she can roam around the map unseen with ease. The Spirit Stone changes also benefited her greatly in terms of sustain, and she does well with any of the spirit stone items (again, depending on what you need, she can be tanky, AP or AD). Ganks with her ult+W are strong. In teamfights, her flanking power is great, and her sustained damage does wonders, especially if she can survive for a while (the slightly tanky build helps)

Is her kit a little messy? Maybe. But to me at least, her purpose is clear--rush up to the enemy and stick on them as long as possible, dealing damage constantly while staying on top of them. When they die, rush to the next available target, or back off as you need. R->W->E+QQQ...->W once dead.

Sire Hippington3/5/2014, 9:49:17 PM1 votes

Why do u thin Eve is an Assasin? Does she have an gapcloser? nope! Does she have unsane burst? nope, it's decen't but not huge like talon or akali. Does she lack dps? Nope, she actually got an extremly high dps. Does she lack tankiness? Nope, her base stats are decent and her ult shield is huge. Conclusion: Eve is not an assasin, but a Bruiser! Her kit is perfectly fine, besides the somewhat broken passive that needs her numbers to be some what lowish to not destroy everything.

Doing hybrid dmg on bruisers/tanks is actually an advatage, u will deal more dmg early on as ur enemy can't built armor and mr at thes same time(effecktivly and with some hp) Later on, u usually focus on the enemy squishys, so huge amounts of pen aren't needed anyway. For hybrid bruisers, we also have good items, as u rarly will built more than 2 or 3 off-items, so trinity+gunblade+gynsos is enugh.

For Hybrid DDs(ranged dps, assasins and, somewhat unlikely, meleecarrys and burst/dps casters), the current situation is pretty bad, wich is why they don't exists.

The reason why the situation is bad is because of itemisation. We have only 3 items that offer ad+ap, 2 of them also have AS(not what u want on a assasin or caster). We also have no hybrid pen,wich is needed to handle tanks without having to insane dmg vs squishy (u could use very high scalings to bypass the missing %pen, but it would mean u delete any squishy in a split second)

Ad/Ap fulldmg bults are so strong cause the diffrent items/stats synergies well with each other, so each item becomes stronger for each other item u get. For Hybrid, this isn't the case, and we also have not much hybrid items.

With some more hybrid items, it would be very well possible to get hybrid dds working, but they would become to strong cause of the lack of counter itemisation, so we would need effecktive hybrid.def items, wich would cause quite some truble for the overall balanceing.

TL;DR: Eve is not an assasin, she is a bruiser. Bruisers and tanks work well with hybrid dmg. There is no hybrid glasscanon in lol cause it would require alot more itmes, causeing quite some truble for the overall balance(not impossible, but requiers alot of work)

P.s. I don't think u know how trinity works, it scales of base-ad, not total-ad, so building more ad won't change anything about trinitys dmg

LexCor3/8/2014, 12:37:54 AM1 votes

I think there's a huge misconception about having scaling or damage type (x) and needing to use it. Having some AP scaling on a predominantly AD champion doesn't mean it's a waste, and vice versa (although that's rarer).

Let's remember that we're not LCS players, and that the pool of viable champions and build paths is significantly greater. Guinsoo's Rageblade is an unbelievably powerful item on Kayle or Jax. Hextech Gunblade can be the better option for the scaling AP component and shorter cooldown, especially on someone like Mordekaiser or Katarina.

I think that, within the confines of the greater League playing population, there's very few absolutes. Confidence and comfort in your champion and build choices often weigh a lot more than the pretexted "meta" that we see pros exercise. Anyone can number crunch, but it's extremely hard to factor math into a choice based game, where skillshots and dodges, ambushes and vision play such a huge role.