Supporting Xypherous: About Jayce's canceled rework.

Hello guys, a Jayce's caring player here ^^ For those who aren't familiar with the changes, I'll post a link to a surrender@20 article with the proposed changes, and another with why said changes were aborted.

http://www.surrenderat20.net/2013/07/xypherous-on-upcoming-jayce-pbe-changes.html

http://www.surrenderat20.net/2014/02/red-post-collection-update-on-rengar_28.html

With this posts I'd like to gather feedback about how the community felt and still feels about Jayce's kit as proposed by Xypherous, and give my feedback about the kit as it was, its potential, and my thoughts on the direction it was taking for Jayce. As you may guess, I was really engaged by Jayce's proposed changes, and I'm a little sad in hearing it has been canceled.

Reason why I liked the changes.

As someone on s@20 wrote, before the nerf everyone was picking him due to infinite poke, now they don't pick him because his poke is insufficient. I think Jayce's power spike should be distributed more evenly and not be focused about his Q in ranged form. Xypherous's kit was a nice step in this direction. The Q damage at level 6 was higher, but due to it coming later, during lane phase Jayce had to make a good use of his improved kit across all his abilities to get an edge, which is fine since, unlike Nidalee, he's a transform champion with transform available since level 1. His W changes were going to make Jayce had a more even damage in lategame while removing the issues of HyperCharge priming. The reduced mana cost on to the skies! were directed to reduce the pressure Jayce had in using it to harass, since the now higher costs on Thundering Blow made Jayce's total mana cost higher if he had to use his knock back to disengage. Basically, his kit and lane presence was more focused in skirmishing and transforming, and his damage was higher but more riskier, since endless poke wasn't going to inflict enough damage due to the abilities having 6 ranks.

Things I found messy/problematic

Hyper Charge early cooldown was a little too high, for the (altough smaller) damage reduction on Jayce's own autos, but the most glaring flaw was (IMHO) the Static Field new effect. WHile the concept of Jayce autos being stronger while Static Fielded was cool, especially the part where you could combine it with Hyper Charge, it had some issues in its scaling: the AP part and the base damage were both feeling underperforming, and considering how W is essentially Jayce's second damage tool, and that Hyper Charge was changed to avoid priming ( I agree it's cheesy, but golly, it nets results!), the extra damage on static field wasn't enough to push Jayce into an effective melee range menace. My idea was to make Static Field AoE damage to keep it's aoE ratio, but make the magic damage on his autos scale with Jayce's bonus AD, (with a diminished effect in ranged form to avoid Static Field-> transform->HyperCharge and ranged auto's spamming that could potentially make him unapproachable in toplane) .

About Jayce's new role with Xyph's changes.

I already said it, but I really liked Xyph's changes and its motivation. The goal of the changes were to broaden Jayce's kit and reduce some oppression from Shock Blast when it was spammed from far away , making it easier to dodge, while enhancing Jayce's sustained damage output in melee form. As such, Jayce could still be an effective Glass cannon with a high damage build consisting in pretty much AD plus whatever fit your build, with still the same damage from Shock blast (even more at rank 6) but paying the cost of squishyness (even more than live) and a now easier to dodge skillshot, plus the inability to prime W for cheesy muramana procs (6 procs in less than 2.5 seconds) . On the other hand, Jayce could now also fit better into the bruiser role, with higher melee damage and presence, and reduced mana costs into melee form (expect the Thundering blow, which was supposed to be the only high cost skill due to its utility). This would open for a tanky-dps solution for when the game situation changes and he cannot make use of his long range artillery, with a on-hit build and 2 tanky items.

the new kit broadened both Jayce's play and counterplay, and altough it was far from perfect, it was IMHO really fun to play and had a nice feel.

I'd like to hear from Riot some more about why it was canceled , especially because what Xyph's answered on NA boards is a little cloudy.

6 levels on skills. No levelup on ultimate - gains changed to character level with nonlinear scaling Melee 'W' redo Heavy Mana cost experiments (Melee E - a billion, Melee Q - nearly free) Basically everything that wasn't a problem with Jayce. :P

this applies to most reworks, in many of them they touched things that weren't a problem in the first place for the sake of a better kit. How was Jayce's different? Because it was played more? He surely was played less after they reduced the parts of his kit that were indeed a problem. Also, while those parts weren't a problem, that doesn't mean that Xypherous's rework couldn't turn out to be even better than live.