User blog:Krufix/Krufix Nidalee Rework

It's widely known that Nidalee has granted so much pain to players and especially pain to Riot in the past. Nidalee's kit at the moment makes her all but unbalancable, she will ether become completely unfun to play against, or completely drowned out in various metas.

I have to say that I dislike the direction her rework took her. Not talking about the champion balance or toxicity, it's just that she deserved a lot more change, a lot more "Pow!" to her powers.

For one thing her lore screams jungler. But when she was reworked she was pure mid laner... then a single change gave her the power to jungle to the point of abusivness, her rework didn't design her as a jungler and thus it was untested when she did become one.

I'd personally like to drop a whole lot of stuff in her kit which aren't central to the character. This is an idea for a rework which I planned long before her actual rework happened, something to shift power around and make her have more periods of strength and weakness instead of her power being the same constantly. And if nothing else then it cannot hurt to write it down.

Abilities
Nidalee in the jungle is designed to be a true guerrilla warfare style champion. She deals with invades and invading the enemy jungler more than anything else.

She can deal with enemy invaders by placing her Bushwack traps down around her jungle, acting as wards and a powerful deterrent against the enemy jungler, the threat of her empowered spear damage is enough to send anyone away as she no longer needs to be at massive range in order to bring that damage.

Meanwhile she can bring the revenge by invading the enemy jungler too. She can once again place down her Bushwack traps only this time in opportune spots in the enemy jungle and wait in a nearby bush for them to walk by. The Bushwack's slow will make it easy to hit them for massive damage, and then Nidalee's Primal Surge grants her extra damage to finish them off with.

Post-6 she is able to enter the enemy jungle and kill them even easier, with the ability to first Track the enemy jungler to seek them out, land an empowered spear for extra damage, charging in with Hunt and with Track's added root effect they will be helpless to escape a massive Takedown.

However this power is now gated behind a long ult cooldown which is not always available. Nidalee is still squishy by herself and if she is forced to pop her ult to escape with then she will be without her cougar form for quite a while... or just die anyway since her Hunt can be interrupted by any CC which interrupts her movement and she no longer has the ability to jump over walls without the aid of Flash.

--

Meanwhile in the mid lane, the loss of damage over range as well as the slightly shorter range of the spear itself means that Nidalee can no longer just spam spears, however her Javelin Toss now being able to pass through minions means that Nidalee now has much more reliable damage even if the spear does receive a huge damage penalty from first hitting a minion.

The damage penalty means that the spear still rewards accuracy, while the opportunity to do full damage even through minions with the use of a well placed Bushwack rewards foresight and setup. Even if the enemy can see a bushwack placed in lane the massive radius of the trap can mean that it's difficult to move is Nidalee sets up a lot of them. (For reference, 400 radius is the same as Nasus' spirit fire). So the enemy laner must try their best to bait their own minions into triggering them.

-

Also yes, her Hunt passive is indeed inspired by my favourite ability in Dota2 Phantom Lancer's Phantom Rush and has identical strengths and limitations (only with the added ability to use it as an escape by targeting a brush).