Talk:Kayle/@comment-3238314-20110726220047

Phreak on why Kayle's passive wasn't remade into a toggle:

Here's my theory on it.

Kayle's E being at such a short cooldown means you still must itemize ~1-2k gold in CDR. This includes runes (glyphs in my case) and Nashor's Tooth.

This is basically the balancing act. Certainly, it could be made to drain 5 mana per second and leave it at that, but a basically passive +60 AoE damage that splashes your basic attack is really overpowered if you get it innately. Gating it with item slots and gold allows you to say, "Okay, this isn't a passive until 15 minutes in the game if Kayle makes serious item sacrifices" which actually balances it out.

Classick tried making it a toggle a few months back. The numbers to make it balanced did not overlap with the numbers that made it feel satisfying to use. Look at Nidalee's Q. That thing misses like 90% of the time if your opponents are paying attention. But oh man is that ability fun to use. The contrapositive is true with Kayle's E being a toggle. It's really easy to get it super overpowered and yet not feel like it's doing anything because it's just "always there" and doesn't feel special.

Comparably, Lich Bane can make your auto attacks deal 1,000 damage, yet no one buys it at 55 minutes as their sixth item on mages. If you could buy 1k damage Lich Bane at 10 minutes, every champion in the game would do so.