Talk:Syndra/@comment-6061249-20140721151900/@comment-9533487-20140820172037

Maybe smartcast and non-smartcast were the same for you because while smartcast has the potential to be faster, you're more accustomed to non-smartcast, causing you to respond slower in smartcasting than you would once you get used to it? It's a possibility anyway.

My take on "what is so hard about her" is as follows. Syndra is an AOE mage with most of her AOE damage on her relatively small Q, making it hard to take good advantage of that fact (being an AOE mage) unless the enemy deliberately ignores you and clusters up in ~3 champion models worth of space.

Her W's AOE, although slightly larger, is pretty telegraphed, has a long travel time at max range, and considering how important it is in hitting Q vs people with high movespeed it has a long cooldown.

Not really much to complain about with her E, it travels very fast and has the largest potential for AOE damage because its AOE increases per sphere. There is a lot of situational counterplay to it though, as I'm sure is well known now that Syndra's relatively popular.

As for Syndra's ult, there's almost too much to say...to ult you need to be pretty close, for your ult to deal the most damage you need to build CDR, cast several spells before ulting, and still have the mana pool afterwards to ult someone. You need to figure out the right person to ult, the right time to ult, and how to get there to do that on a relatively immobile mage. If the enemy you need to ult has intargetability, you need to either bait it out or you can't do much of anything. By the way...for 7 sphere ult, that's a minimum of 9.6s setup time with max cdr, which is a really big obstacle against getting it done right in the right place at the right time.