User blog comment:Seventy-twelve/My thoughts on Nidalee/@comment-13944607-20131202175051/@comment-24242333-20131202200201

Why think of the human form and cougar form separately instead of one? Mainly because you can't access the cougar form until level 6. So basically you are stuck with a non synergising kit until you get your ultimate, and you have to deal with it.

These two kits are also opposite in some way; the massive damage on Javelin Toss and the huge heal of Primal Surge makes it very tempting to build lot of AP; which makes you a glass cannon, which means you do not want to go melee in cougar form. This is also sad because, as I said in the blog post, I find that the funniest part of Nidalee is her cougar Q. I even changed my item build to stray away from the glass cannon type, and my win ratio with her has never been so high; I can effectively fight and survive in cougar form. But on the other hand, my heal is much worse and low distance spear really don't hurt much, which mean I cannot poke and heal as effectively as with a pure AP build during pre-teamfight phases.