An idea to fix Ahri

Over the last month or so I've noticed a large spike in people complaining about the current state of Ahri, stating she is weak, far too team reliant, unable to make solo plays unless ridiculously fed, that her W is a boring and useless spell, her passive is extremely boring and rather useless, and that there is little reward for landing Q on multiple champions.

It is true that Ahri is a champion on the weaker side and every point made above is valid to some degree. However a revert to older versions is not a good way to go about buffing Ahri. I continuously see people asking for the return of the charm amp or the removal of the orb movement speed. The reality is the charm amp was extremely binary and forced Ahri to be an assassin, removing the ability for a versatile champion to express her versatility. The Q movement speed is debatable, but Ahri is already extremely ult reliant and does need something other than raw numbers to be an interesting champion. Being able to run around quickly to dodge and reposition helps to balance out her power windows.

With that said, I will now present my proposed fix which does not involve the removal of Q movement speed or the return of charm amp. My aim is to make W a worthwhile ability to level, make it feel more rewarding upon landing Q on multiple targets, to increase her assassination potential and finally, to make her passive something interesting all while retaining current levels of counterplay.

Passive: Ahri gains 10%/15%/20%/25%/30%/35% spell vamp at levels 1/4/7/10/13/16 against enemy champions that cannot act. (so enemies affected by things like charms and stuns, not roots)

Q: unchanged

W: Damage per additional foxfire reduced to 25% from 30%. new passive: Phantom Flame: Ahri launches a foxfire that deals 50% damage at enemy champions hit by the return of Orb of Deception.

E: unchanged

R: unchanged

Discussing the passive change first, I believe that her current passive does not fit her character and is a relatively boring and inconsequential ability in most games. My goal is to make her passive feel better to use, while retaining the healing function and adding counterplay and decision making. If you lead with charm you can heal for a decent amount but become more predictable, but if you save it you won't heal as much but can be much more unpredictable. As a side note, Ahri is a succubus, it makes sense that she steals life from targets that are not able to defend themselves. It doesn't make sense that she steals life from waves of enemies like Vlad who treats stealing life like a fighting style.

On to the W change. This change significantly increases the potential for her AoE damage which is something that a kiting mage needs as well as brings her single target damage back to respectable levels, allowing her to actually kill enemies by herself. It ties this damage to the skill required to manage the backswing of her Q which can be outplayed with flash or simply dodged. Skillful Ahri players that manage teamfights well will see a significant increase in damage potential. The small damage reduction also further stifles the famous wrrr combo that people complain so much about while allowing more damage to be added on to her abilities as it is tied to her primary skillshot. Finally it also allows the Q -> auto proccing thunderlords trading pattern to exist again since W is a separate damage source, allowing Ahri to have the same pressure in lane that she used to.

And there you have it, 2 changes essentially addressing every single problem that people have with the current state of Ahri. As a side note, I got the idea for the W change from Imaqtpie when he complained that Orb of Deception wasn't very deceiving. I thought to myself that he was right and that it might be more true to the name if it somehow resulted in a visible two-pronged attack on the enemy.

Thanks for reading.

TL;DR: Some of you guys hang on to the past too much, removal of charm amp and addition of Q ms are good things. Change her passive to give spell vamp on enemies that cannot act, make it so her W shoots a 50% damage bolt at all enemies hit by Q backswing. Leave everything else alone.