User blog comment:Krufix/Krufix Nidalee Rework/@comment-26442038-20150707105556

I think Nidalee is quite ok atm, but your changes to Nidalee seem pretty good. Most of your ideas are well thought of, but I noticed a few things that need to be considered for.

1a. Making the traps give bonus damage when a spear lands is not reliable. If someone steps on a trap, they would back-out immediately. Or they could be halfway across the map. You also have to place them outside of the jungle for the bonus damage in lane or sieging a turret, and the odds of an enemy team doing it is quite low. You won't really make use of it much unless your lucky. It's kinda similar to using Ekko's ult in lane. Most of the time, he uses it as an escape so the damage becomes quite uesless. However, if the enemies are idiots, then he would nuke and annahilate them.

1b. Bushwhack's main purpose is a scouting tool. However in this rework Nidalee's traps are meant to give bonus damage to spears. This seem like a good idea but using traps in teamfights are very hard to pull of. They require setting up. They also require the enemies to step on them for you to make use of them. Shaco, Teemo and Caitlyn's traps are already quite useless in a teamfight if you don't set them up in advance because you would only make use of them once and they might not even be activated since they have a time to arm.

2. Bushwaks rooting an enemy minion or monster is quite unnecessary and won't do much in the game. It's kinda like Talon's slow on his E, he won't make use of it since it has a super short duration and he uses his abilities on that period of time. The root would be useless on minions since it is very east to land your skills on them.

This isn't a very big deal, but I don't like giving champions additional strenghts that are uesless for them or their team.

3a. Also Nidalee's still impossible to catch in the jungle since the cooldown of Hunt is only 5 seconds, so using a bunch of move command into brush still makes her very slippery. However, I have a feeling you overlooked it would change it soon.

4. While she becomes impossible to catch in the jungle and has very good chasing power, once she's out of the jungle, she would be very vulnerable in cougar form. Similar to Elise, it would be very risky for her to be in melee range since she does not have her dash anymore, so once she gets in, she puts herself in range to cc and other damaging abilities. She would probably be forced to build tanky and deal few damage like Elise since she won't ever be able to be in melee range without an escape.

5. Her teamfight may or may not be worse. She would deal okay damage with her spears (and if you're lucky you would get the bonus damage) and she has good DPS with that new E. However she can no longer buff your carry's AS or land spears from afar to match the damage a mage would deliver. She would be like a worst Kayle if you stay in Human form. You would have to be in melee form to do a good amount of damage, but as I said, it's risky since she can't escape.

Nidalee is a very hard champion to balance/rework, but I think that most of your ideas are good. Some of them just need a little tweaking or balancing. Also, since you removed Nidalee's long range nuke, why not revert the missile speed and width nerf since it is already hard to hit and not so rewarding unless you hit a target with Bushwhack, which is even harder to pull of.