@Morello: The Jester needs help!
I remember you saying Shaco has a rework coming up, and if I remember correctly, you said he's a high priority. While it makes me sad to hear this (because I love his current kit very much), I can understand why you want to rework him. He can be really frustrating to play against, especially if the player behind the massmurdering jester is good and knows what he's doing. Therefore, this thread is not dedicated to opposing the rework or suggesting things for the rework (as much as I'd like to), and I'll instead focus on his state on the Live servers right now.
We all know Shaco was nerfed, and hit quite hard too, some time ago. Deceive range reduced, Two-Shiv Poison's slow reduced by a significant amount, and all the other nerfs even before these. He's still playable, and can do well in good hands, but this doesn't mean he needs help. I played him once earlier today after a taking a long break from playing Shaco. the match went swimmingly for our team, and I remembered how much fun my good ol' Demon Jester can be. However, not all matches go so smoothly. Reasons for this vary. I might be playing badly, or "not in my zone"... or then Shaco just proves to be, well, not useful, or then my otherwise decent playing gets screwed over by the various problems Shaco has.
To make it a little shorter, I'll list some things here and go through them.
-Buffs still show on clone. This is awful. Just awful. Shaco is a JUNGLER, he WILL have buffs a lot during the game, especially early on where he's supposed to shine. On every other jungler, having buffs has no downsides to them, but on Shaco, it completely ruins his ultimate. Something is wrong when simply having buffs makes your ult pretty much useless. Please, make buffs appear on his clone too. I'm sure this has been asked for a lot of times in the past.
-Box AI should be tweaked. Not sure how, but somehow. It's rather annoying how boxes can start focusing the smaller jungle monsters in camps, and after the Fear changes, they tend to fear away the buff monster out of their range, and start focusing on the smaller monsters. This is annoying, but not something that has to be necessarily fixed over something else. I can deal with this.
-Box HP needs to be increased lategame. I know Shaco is a wonderful splitpusher, but not all players splitpush with Shaco and do nothing else. I, for one, actually find myself having success in teamfights with my tricky plays pretty often. But having your box disappear immediately the moment you set it down because of one or two minor AoE spells from the enemies? It sucks. It's not fun for the Shaco to have a useless ability in a teamfight like that. I had an idea for it, maybe make it 3-hit, like wards or Zyra's plants? That way they wouldn't be immediately destroyed, and would actually be somewhat of a threat that has to be focused down.
-Fix Hallucinate clone AI. This is very important. The clone very often stops doing what it's ordered to, and I often find my clone just chilling somewhere a little bit away from the fight because it decided to be lazy. It's also frustrating to see your clone stop attacking your enemy after your enemy kills you, and then once in a blue moon actually see it chase after your opponent.
-Give him a tiny buff to his base resists. Seriously. I know he's supposed to be squishy, but every other assassin has better base resists than him (as far as I know), Shaco's are near nonexistent. This isn't absolutely necessary, but it would make him at least a bit more manageable to survive with. If this is something you won't consider, how about increasing his base HP regen slightly to make his sustain a bit better in the jungle? Midgame and forward, his boxes wont tank jungle camps much, if at all, and Shaco has to facetank the camps, meaning he's gonna lose a fair bit of health unless he has a lot of lifesteal.
-Give him back his old Deceive range. Or at least increase it slightly, by maybe 30 or 50 units. His current Deceive just doesn't feel so good to use, really.
These fixes (buffs?) would make Shaco a little more enjoayble to play, while not pushing him over the line and making him borderline-OP again. Morello, please, please, PLEASE consider these, at least some of them. I know the rework is on it's way, but since it's gonna be a while before it even hits PBE, I (and many other Shaco players, I'm sure) would like to have the Demon Jester a bit more on par with other assassins. I don't want to get aggressive(ish), but it feels like you compensate other assassins with something when you guys nerf them, but poor Shaco has no buffs, despite his kit having various bugs that ruin gameplay for him more than often. I'm not a fantastic player, I've never even finished my placements to get a ranking, but I do think my knowledge of the game is good enough to know that something is bugged and/or on the weak side of balance.
I'd love to discuss his upcoming rework too, if you're up for it!
Show the jester some love!
