Future of Kindred
Hello! I'd like to share my thoughts about current situation of The Eternal Hunters. First of all we all (I guess) know that they are not in the best spot right now. After few nerfs and the final (heal out, armor down) one they disappeared from the jungle, ending up with one of the lowest jungle win ratios. I've also been tracking changes on the PBE and I saw that You tried to buff them (E buff, AD and AS growth), but none of these changes made it to live servers. I don't know if Riot Games still wants Kindred to be viable for other players (only OTP's play them well now) but I would like to tell what I feel should be done to them. So, what Kindred should be? Mobile, ranged jungler who scales throughout entire match thanks to the passive. Their base armor reduction was reasoned by other ADC's stats. However Kindred are not "normal" ADC as most marksmen have support by their side who will help them. Eternal Hunters can not count on a support. Of course they have Lamb's Respite to get more time and hopefully turn around a duel, but in the first minutes of the game they doesn't have access to it which makes them very vulnerable when it comes to getting jungle marks. Let's say that the first mark appeared on Raptors. Kindred are level 3 and they're heading straight to the camp. Unfortunately they meet Rengar in the river who tries to hunt down The Eternal Hunters. What happens? Kindred have no stacks (no bonus damage), their armor is as low as their buddy's from bot lane, but they can't count on help. This is problematic, because now, early dueling as Kindred has much higher skill cap and often makes players give up on getting a mark as it get too risky compared to "not nerfed Kindred". Another problem is that now The Eternal Hunters are absolutely useless for their team if they won't get first few passive stacks. Before it was compensated by higher damage output on their abilities. Now Kindred rely ONLY on the passive to have decent mid/late game. I think it should be a bit easier to get marks. For instance there can be a little delay before enemies could see which camps got marked by the Wolf. Also the time it takes for mark to apply on the enemy champion should be 1-2 seconds shorter, because often they either got killed too quickly (when our laner doens't want to wait) or the enemy runs away as soon as they notice they are getting marked. And that's basically it. I really hope that Riot will do something about bringing Kindred back to meta as a decent counter to tanky junglers as well as a decent carry jungle (kinda like Graves). Please take it in consideration in the future PBE cycles and tell me what do You think about what You read here. Best of luck Riot :)