User blog comment:Contractas1/Nidalee - Mistake or Miracle?/@comment-8506165-20131103210024

Nidalee is ridiculously broken. I'd go as far as to say she is the most broken champion in all of League.

Her Q is her most attention grabbing skill, obviously. It rewards Nidalee for taking no risk by ramping its damage up to stupid levels if it hits at increased range, and said range is pretty ridiculous. It gets to the point where it outdamages several pure-damage ultimate abilities if it hits at max range, and is on a mere 6-second cooldown. It's also not a particularly difficult skillshot to hit. Compare it to Morgana's Dark Binding, which moves more slowly and has less range, or Anivia's Flash Frost, which I think is the slowest skillshot in the game. People still somehow play these champs and make them work, so I don't buy the whole "nid is trash just dodge spears" argument. Were dodging every skillshot that easy, Lee Sin, Kennen, Morgana, Lux, Thresh and many other frequent picks would be total trash tier.

But regardless, her Q being absolutely ridiculous might be justified if the rest of her kit were lacklustre to make up for it. The problem is... it's not. Let's look at Bushwhack. The amount of resists it shreds are on a par with Trundle's ult. But the duration is actually longer - 12 seconds of being a squishy should you have one of these chucked under you while you're CC'd. Ouch. But that's still not quite enough - let's make it reveal for the full duration as well, and why not chuck some moderate damage on that benefits from the shredded resists? Ah, much more balanced.

Her E. Primal Surge. Ironically the element of her kit that gets the least attention, when it's the highest AP-scaling heal of any basic ability in the game, bar Taric's self-heal which is down for a nerf in the PBE. Matches Healbot's ult in AP scaling, and is outmatched only by Janna's Monsoon. Well, this seems pretty balanced already, but why don't we add a fairly high AS buff onto it? Say... more than a Phantom Dancer or Zephyr give you? Yup, now we've got Nidalee's E.

And then her Cougar form. Already she's got ridiculous mobility making her insanely safe when she's spamming out those ridiculous spears and healing her backline. This is only augmented by her spammable dash on W, which of course has damage attached as well, because why the hell not? Now let's add in an execution move with fairly high base damage and a 100% total AD scaling, which is amplified up to 3 times by the amount of target's missing health. And then to finish up, let's give her ridiculous waveclear on E, making her an evil split-pusher, giving her easy farming under her turret, and another spell in her combo on enemy champions. Oh, and all of this is for 0 mana cost, and free Tear charges when she's just getting around the map due to how Tear works. Jayce charged Tear way too quickly with Transform so we'll nerf that, but Nidalee can keep pounce-spam.

She's an incredibly frequent pick (27% of games today, according to LoLKing), incredibly annoying to play against, and the very way her kit is designed promotes some serious anti-fun game patterns. I think her kit's just broken and needs a rework, but until then, just nerf some of her stuff. Her kit combined is just too much at the moment. It's not fun being sieged under a rain of 1500-damage spears while she heals her entire team up to full and chews up any minion waves that come anywhere near.

Oh, and this is just AP Nidalee. AD Nidalee is annoying in her own special way. Not quite as toxic though.