User blog:Willbachbakal/(Champion Rework) Cassiopeia, the Serpent's Embrace

This is a tentative rework for Cassiopeia, the Serpent's Embrace. Despite being a fairly old champion, Cass only surged into prominence last year, when she was reworked for the Shurima update. The results were pretty mixed, to say the least: initially, the new Cassiopeia was catastrophically bad, and was horribly weak on top of still keeping some of her age-old bugs. It was clear her rework was rushed, and the community disliked the direction she had been taken in (E-spamming hypercarry, rather than a dedicated poison mage). After a flurry of buffs, fixes and occasional nerfs, she eventually became far more popular, both in normal and competitive play, than she had ever been before, but there is still a sizeable amount of dissatisfaction surrounding her: even though a lot of power got shifted towards her poisons, she's still mainly focused on her spammy E, and her new passive, while potentially interesting in developing her strength, is a massive bundle of stats that doesn't particularly relate to her theme. Even now, Riot Stashu is still considering modifying Cass to bring her closer to that fantasy.

In the end, though, while Stashu got a lot of hate for handling Cassiopeia's rework, he did improve her in a lot of ways: she has a better-defined power progression, more streamlined build options (she used to end up with a weird late-game conundrum where she was either too squishy or not dealing enough damage) and a tighter kit. Her E, which is widely disliked, always existed on her, and she is objectively more poison-focused than she was before. I feel there's a lot to Stashu's changes that significantly improved her, and I think there are also parts of her that could also be changed more integrally. The following is a pretty poison-centric take on Cass, where she still keeps her hypercarry power progression and basic kiting minigame, but also has a much more streamlined ability set, and a less cluttered ability order (that's more thing):

Abilities
What do you think of this? What are your thoughts on Cassiopeia, both before and after her rework? What do you think is her identity? Does she fully capture that on live, and do the above changes bring her closer to the gameplay fantasy you'd want to achieve with her?