User blog comment:Care Level/An Elise Though/@comment-5556439-20130923135823/@comment-9593635-20130923154855

I personally don't believe there's anything inherently wrong with %health damage; it punishes stacking health in the same way that True Damage or magic/armor penetration punish stacking resistances: you pay for a stat and it's less gold efficient because it can be somewhat ignored in some cases.

People say that buying AP on %health-based damage dealers is somewhat of a waste because of "poor scalings", but I'm inclined to disagree: 100 AP on Elise is another 3% health; assuming that a target has 2000 health (about average), that's 60 extra damage on a half-health target. Best case, it's 120 damage; who else has a 1.2% AP ratio on their non-ultimate abilities?

Obviously, the numbers are better on beefier targets and not as dramatic on squishies, but to say "she has poor AP scalings" isn't the truest of statements; raw AP and pen stats are both viable and necessary, as with other AP casters. The reason penetration is generally valued more on Elise is that she does more damage to beefier targets, inherently, and they tend to be the ones with strong resistances.

Removing the front-loaded damage is a huge hit to Elise's laning: any time previous she would barely-survive an all-in leaves the would-be-dead opponent time to attempt to go 1 for 1 (as opposed to the previous 1 for 0); her resistances help with that, but that's the point: rewarding her opponent for catching her out of proper form was supposed to be a benefit for skilled players, an opportunity to capitalize on misplay.

That's gone, now, and outright removing it does nothing save lower the skill cap in the lane for both sides.