User blog comment:MOTZI/Think About It - Hybrids/@comment-5209745-20140330234303

Hybrid champions were obviously a thing in LoL, but a thing that is slowly dissappearing.

Take Kayle per example. I mean, I don't remember losing a single game with her as a hybrid in S2, then they wanted her to be an AP-AS hybrid (Which, should say, are a bigger thing than AD-AP hybrids nowadays, and it doesn't seems to be disappearing. Actually it seems to be really good), and have been killing slowly the AD part of her since then. Yes, the nerf to Q would look like if they're trying to raise again AD-AP Kayle, but I address that to plain bad reasoning when thinking about how to balance her. Right now it's just a spell that works like an AA reset but doesn't resets your attack timer nor applies on-hit effects, yet the ratios are the same of an AA reset and applies her innate like if it was an AA.

Simmilar things happen to the rest of the hybrid champs. Jax and Skarner are now better seen as tanky DPS's, Akali is better seen as an AP assassin, Nidalee was directly turned into an AP caster, and then there is Ezreal, who's obviously a caster, but can't play as an AD caster because he only has one physical damage ability, while also being unable to play as an AP caster because his bigger AP damaging spell it's his ult, and if you build him hybrid so you can try to mitigate that lackluster kit, you'll get blamed whatever your score is. The only character who seemingly can be played as a hybrid is Poppy, and that might be just because she's so underplayed that there is no consensus about what build is better for her.

Actually, most of the champs in the hybrid list are strong, but either Riot or the community seem to be struggling to remove their original identity. It might be because of the common thinking about how hard is supposed to counter a character with two kinds of damages (Psssst, GA), or it might be because it's just plain hard to make an hybrid champion and balance it, which is still Riot's fault for not giving hybrid champs more item choices: Trinity, Gunblade and Rageblade have been there for eons, and at best the only "new" hybrid item that they have given to us is Nashor's (Which is actually more of an AP-AS hybrid item than an AD-AP one). How do you expect to know how to balance an hybrid if you don't give them an armor/magic pen choice and a late game item, like the suggested fable of the item that could turn a percentage of bonus AD into AP and a percentage of AP into AD? If you don't take the hybrid potential to the max, you can't know where should it stand to be balanced.

All that said, hybrid game revolves around autoattacking (Trinity's Spellblade, Guinsoo's stacks, Gunblade's lifesteal, Nashor's on-hit effect), and nowadays people prefer to burst rather than spending five seconds DPS'ing somebody. So even if Riot decided to make new hybrid items and new hybrid champions, people would still not play them with the current meta, so it's rather unbeliable that Riot would make soon any new champ. Probably they will keep trying to make us forget about them.

TL;DR: So yeah, I think hybrids are a thing, a hella funny thing, and I'm disappointed with their current situation. I would love to see a new hybrid champ, but right now, with the item choices we have, it would need so much high base damages and high hybrid ratios to keep on with the rest of the crew, that he would look so OP in paper that nobody would want it released.