User blog:Willbachbakal/(Champion Rework) Evelynn, the Widowmaker

This is a tentative rework for Evelynn, the Widowmaker. Poor Eve's been suffering for years now, always alternating between being either almost unplayably weak or tremendously oppressive, with an accompanying stream of large buffs, nerfs and reworks intended to fix the issues of her previous iterations. At the core of her problems is the implementation of her long-duration stealth, which has so far led her to become so overbearing during the laning phase that she can't be allowed to scale well into the late-game, or even be that effective when ganking early on. Compounding this issue is that of her overall fighting pattern clashing with her theme, as she's intended to be a squishy assassin but spends so much time fighting enemies from up close that she's often forced to build tanky (the innate defenses granted by her ult also benefit a tanky build more than an assassin build). In general, she's lacking a strong thematic or gameplay identity, to the point where even Riot's been struggling so far to pin down what makes or breaks Evelynn. Her overall design's been a mess for a long time, and in her current state she cannot be allowed to become as strong or as vicious as she deserves to be.

While I'm not particularly focused on crafting lore or fleshing out characters here, nor would I be too good at either, I think there are at least some basic elements to Evelynn that could be brought up. She's obviously some kind of creature of the night, and relies on the shadows in some way to empower herself and torture her enemies to death. I think this could also be the solution to her early power, and implementing the night into her kit could allow her to have periods of tremendous strength and utility where enemies would have to keep on their toes, without necessarily imposing an unnecessary cost in anti-stealth options (especially since I want to remove mechanics that specifically target stealth, as explained here). The general goal here is to keep Eve's core strengths (e.g. stealth, slipperiness, enemy trailing) and weaknesses (super-low reach, constant susceptibility to kiting) while engineering her into a true assassin, rather than a middling bursty bruiser.

Abilities
What do you think of these changes? What are your thoughts on Eve, and what do you think her identity is or should be? Does the above kit correspond to that identity? Which direction do you think Rito should take to improve Evelynn?