User blog comment:Sagee Prime/Nidalee changes I would like feedback on/@comment-3323227-20110222220441

So I'm just going to go through a basic explanation of Nidalee's Current strengths and weaknesses and address how this list of potential ability buffs and additions will improve Nidalee without being too much or too little. First off Nidalee's early game is all about surviving and exploiting enemy weaknesses especially if you are taking a solo 1v2 or 1v1 lane. you don't want to be overly aggressive and do not want to push. your min source of damage here is auto attacks and your defense is heals which supplement your attacks. you get by by letting the enemy push to your tower and scoring as many last hits as possible and taking jabs when the enemy presents the opportunity. Nidalee can be easily countered here by making her push and or harassing her out of mana. If you can harass from out of reach with little cost your self even better so champions that are able to ranged poke at Nidalee can quickly drain her of mana for heals which will normally force her out of lane. If the enemy instead decides to push into Nidalee's territory she has protection of the turret and can gain last hits much easier and if the enemy is very aggressive here they risk being weak around the time she hits level 6 which normally results in death to her enemy. once Nidalee picks up kills she snowballs to mid game and then her damage levels off and becomes mediocre while other enemies keep going up in damage. I personally have to either have a weak enemy in my lane or a very good jungler to get to the point of being a fed Nidalee otherwise you just last hit until you are a farmed Nidalee. either way the result is the same for farmed or Fed. If happen into the shutdown category where you get harassed out of the lane you pretty much have a ridiculously hard time coming back from that and will more than likely be useless the whole game if you cannot come back from here.My changes hope to address this issue with being completely shutdown to uselessness and being useless to the team should you get shut down by providing better scaling and improved ability leveling while also rewarding excellent skill comboing. This would IMO raise Nidalee's skillcap which is again IMO not property expressed with the LOL difficulty bar. Lets start with Nidalee' passive. For those around when she came out this passive was awesome. It gave her amazing mobility while in the moving through the jungle but if you also remember there was a lot more brush back then. There is now about half as much brush now and the nerf this passive received was unwarranted since about 50% of the brush got removed. increasing the duration by 1 second and the amount of speed it gives means that the lack of brush doesn't hamper your lost mobility anymore but it still isn't as powerful as it once was. The additional DOT that is added on was originlly removed from Nidalee before her release and acts similar to how the old one did but isn't as powerful due to increased scaling. It is merely just a reward for landing successive hits on an enemy nut it also allows takedown to do additional damage. the damage is only applied by damaging abilities so it is no as easily applies as something like twitches DOT. All abilities have a varying amount of stacks they can add and landing certain abilities is more rewarding that others.

Javelin toss is one of the hardest skillshots in the game to land and has little reward besides heavy damage. It scales well but it limits Nidalee's build options and is a high risk low reward skill mainly because you have to land it at the furthest distance to get the most damage out of it, it costs a ton of mana and it moves very slow making it easy to dodge. So instead of increasing its power completely I gave it more rewards for landing it. Currently the only way for nidalee to make a real difference in a team fight is to heal the carry and kill the enemy carry if she can. however there are too many situations where Nidalee is completely unable to do anything for her team due to lack of CC. So I gave her a very light CC which very abruptly (0.1 seconds) disrupts enemy casting and channels if she successfully land a javelin toss or takedown on that enemy. Additionally I gave her bonus AD scaling that I believe matches the games current scaling balance for such skills so as to increase her build option viability. Finally I reduced the damage on the corresponding cougar skill and made it so that the leveling the human skill would add damage to the cougar skill which then equals out to be the same base damage as the current Nidalee but much later in the game.

Bushwhack is another skill that seldom reaches its full potential. So I increased the life duration of the traps and added Bonus AD scaling to it as well. As a reward this skill applies more stacks of dripping wound increasing its potential damage output and while it does not stack with itself it can easily apply up to 6 stacks if an enemy runs through several traps at once. As with Javelin toss I reduced the base damage of the corresponding cougar skill and made it so that the leveling human skill would add damage to the cougar skill which then equals out to be the same base damage as the current Nidalee but much later in the game.

Primal Surge is a skill I really did not want to touch due to this being the skill that makes or breaks Nidalee I left it alone but As the other two human skills I reduced the base damage of the corresponding cougar skill and made it so that the leveling human skill would add damage to the cougar skill which then equals out to be the same base damage as the current Nidalee but much later in the game.

Aspect of the cougar is what makes Nidalee Nidalee and really the bonus dodge and movement speed just didn't seem to make her going melee very great. You are a squishy ranged and switch to a squishy melee. So I reduced the rank 1 movement speed but made it so each rank makes your base movement speed faster while also adding a small buff to defense in the form of additional armor and magic resist while going into cougar form and just to capitalize on this defensive benefit of her ult she will be able to use this ability while under CC effects so damage taken is as minimal as you can get it. This will reward players that know when to switch forms.

Takedown as you know it may seem great but it is in fact really bugged and if you ever build her as and AD carry this would be pretty obvious but even I do not build her like that. I only know because I used to but it still effects AP Nidalee a little bit. So basically critical strikes and takedown do not mix. If you crit at the same time you are using takedown the crit and takedown damage multipliers will cancel each other out. It basically looks like this: crit = total damage x 2(2.5, etc),Takedown = (total damage + 100)x 1-2, both damage multipliers together = total damage + 100. I hope the math I put forth is easy to understand (should be) but if you need me to explain just ask. Anyway we replace the damage multiplier with the standard crit which is basically the same bu also reduce the base damage but increase the potential damage of the skill by making every additional stack on a target allow takedown to gain additional 10% crit damage per stack on that target and if the champion is low hp takedown applies more stacks meaning a nidalee that gets full stacks on you will be doing as much damage as she would to a champion with low hp. This rewards getting a full combo just as much as fining a champion at low hp that way if a champions is able to regain a ton of hp you will still be hitting as hard with this skill. This ability now benefits from leveling Javelin toss but its base damage is down by about 10%.

Pounce remains largely unchanged other than applying dripping wound, having additional bonus AD scaling, and having its base damage reduced to compensate for human abilities adding damage to the skill as well as ultimate rank.

Swipe gets a major AP buff and additional bonus AD scaling while also applying a higher amount of dripping wound stacks and having its base damage per rank of cougar reduced to compensate for gaining damage from level of human skills and improved scaling.Overall what I hope to achieve is a familiar early game with a slightly weaker mid game and much stronger Late game. I'm sure there is need to a great rework to me. Feedback is always appreciated.