User blog comment:ClariS/Nidalee & Unhealthy State/@comment-9533487-20140420032318/@comment-8506165-20140421154153

It's not just that she has "safe damage". Any long-range champ has safe damage, and some mid-range champs manage it quite well as well. It's just that safe damage should be counterbalanced either by damage you can do to them while they're pumping out that damage really sticking, or that champion being more or less helpless the moment you successfully invade their zone and start beating down on them. Ideally both to some degree (cf. Xerath). But Nid's human form E and cougar form W (and cougar's passive MS) mean that neither of those apply to her, which is why she's still seeing both loads of play and loads of complaints.

That and she's not really gated by cooldowns - Bushwhack is really the only skill with a long cooldown, with Primal Surge being at the upper end of reasonable, but nothing that extreme. No-one's really gated by mana costs any more since most junglers give all blues past their first to mid, and then that's compounded by Tear or Athene's being core buys on almost all APs. (Sure, if you're Anivia then mana's still relevant, otherwise... not really.) So yeah... Nid gets spears every 6s and heals/AS boosts to anyone on her team every 10, which means even outside of a siege situation (in which she should thrive - I don't think anyone's arguing that) she's still actually decent seeing as even in a non-optimal situation for her she can still pump out, say... 285 + 80% AP in damage per 6s (being generous) assuming she can hit Q, and heal for 190 + 70% AP every 10s with 0% CDR, and most Nidalees will get at least some.

She's also got good waveclear - I'm not sure how a total of 525 + 100% AP AoE damage for free can be counted as bad waveclear. It's not as safe as all her other abilities so if you've got a load of minions just outside your turret range then yeah, you're probably good then, but on the flipside if you're trying to push Nidalee so she's forced out of farm, it just doesn't work. But hey, half the popular ADCs in the game at the moment can clear waves pretty quick, and her team's going to have one of them... So even if her waveclear were astoundingly terrible...