Talk:Nidalee/@comment-24496127-20150702204036

I don't think it's possible for Nidalee to ever hit a point where she's a good pick without being either overwhelming or underwhelming. Mostly due to some parts of her kit that make balancing her hard, if not impossible.

First of all, she has a kit with two extremes to it, A long range nuke, and a close range execute. She also has mobility high enough to make use of both in a relatively quick manner. Her spear is also on a relatively low cd, and she can often just fish for one from a distance or go for snipe kills if your team has other forms of poke. Very rarely does she NEED to go into retaliation range to be effective come late game.

I think I should say this now, I'm not saying Nidalee is op and don't think she is, I'm just trying to explain why I feel she's badly designed for balancing.

Here's the biggest problem with Nidalee in my opinion. Unlike most assassins, there is nothing that gates her burst. Unlike Talon, Zed, and even Leblanc(Although not nearly as much as other examples), who have their burst tied to an ult with, while a not very long cooldown, a decently long one, Nidalee can just use her full burst every six seconds. This makes Nidalee really hard to punish, possibly more so than her mobility,

If a Nidalee gets ahead to a point where she can burst you, there's no real decision making on her part other than "if I go in on this squishy will I die to their team" whenever she hits a spear. If the answer is yes throw another one. Even if one spear hits it can basically win a teamfight before it starts anyway. That's not really a problem unless you consider her engage range, as well. Using her mobility to catch up to you, and thus losing damage, isn't a problem with Nidalee, because she gets a speed boost and range increase on her leap.

This gives her a lot of freedom on when to go in or when to just keep poking, and when poke is combined with burst as well as easy hard engage, it just makes the champion a balance nightmare. If she has too much damage then you're going to get burst every six seconds, if she doesn't have enough then you get the spearbot Nid, since no one will jump into a team just to die.

Basically, Nidalee currently has the problem of her burst having no long cd gate unlike many others assassins. This makes her walk a very fine line between "ok" and oppressive. I would compare her to Darius when a kill with the ult gave a full reset to his ult, but unlike Darius there's no stipulations to her having her burst up whenever she needs it. This makes the burst itself inherently hard to put in a "good spot", for lack of a better term.