Talk:Kassadin/@comment-16517370-20151004183753/@comment-26459891-20151013180418

In a lane where there's no need to poke with Q.

E deals more damage than Q, in different scenarios:

1) You all in. When this happens, your E is probably already up or about to be (if you go in at 4 stacks you can get to 6 by casting W and R). You're likely not gonna use more than one rotation of your spells. But if you happen to fight long enough to use another spell, the first one to come back up will be E, due to its shorter cooldown. If you use it when going on an enemy, you're likely going to reach 6 stacks if he fights back, or you'll have done more damage if he doesn't and rather tries to run away. I'd like to point out that if you max E, its slow component gets a lot stronger, meaning you have more chances to keep chasing or to close the gap to use your W (even more useful if you decided to spend gold on a Lich Bane, meaning hitting your W is even more important).

2) Your jungler ganks your lane. In this scenario, you can initiate with your super strong slow on your enemy, popping all your cds, making your jungler's gank much easier. Also your E will probably come up shortly after because with your jungler's and your enemy's spell casts you'll probably reach six stacks on your E almost as soon as you used your first one. If you maxed Q, you'd do overall less damage (because even in the scenario where you could use 2 Qs, you could've had 2 Es and you would've dealt more damage).

3) A teamfight breaks out. Anytime before L.13 (at which point it doesn't matter anymore), having your E maxed is going to be more efficient for the reasons above stated: more damage, better slow, AoE (even more valuable in a team fight), and a very little downtime due to spells flying all over the fights, giving you easy stacks.

This isn't even counting CDR (which, right now, Kassadin should cap through runes and boots), which makes E even better.

I believe that all that offset the malus of having slightly weaker poke in your weakest part of the game where you should be only farming anyway.

Note: all of this is because Q's and E's damage is essentially the same. Back then when Q's base was like 280, it was more of an obvious choice to max it.