User blog:Willbachbakal/(Champion Rework) Elise, the Spider Queen

This is a tentative rework for Elise, the Spider Queen. Poor Elise, how the mighty have fallen. Upon her release, she instantly became a dominant jungler and a strong top laner, one of the few to stand up to in early game power and versatility. That dominance lasted only little over a season, however, after a couple of early Season 4 nerfs slashed her damage, her Spiderlings' tankiness, and her early crowd control. As versatile as she is, she's no longer really good at anything. Problem is, she's not in a state that can be buffed, specifically because of her versatility: her kit is overloaded with practically every effect around (burst, DPS, hard CC, sustain, a gapcloser, vision, hard crowd control, range...), to the point where making her strong at one thing (namely, assassinating people) would make her one-up every other champion she'd be competing against, which is why she was so heavily favored in the first place. She has so much early game power that she can't be allowed to scale well, and has progressively slid into a middling bruiser build, unable to kill people as fast as she'd want to.

Effectively, the main issue here is that Elise needs to be good at fewer things in order to truly shine. I think she can be the assassin she used to be and an even better mage in ranged form, with adequate enough tradeoffs. On a gameplay level, I want to remove everything about her that diverts from her mage/assassination potential (Skittering Frenzy being the worst offender, as it's a bruiser ability), streamline her kit so that she has a well-defined combo, along with clear strengths and weaknesses in both forms (heavy CC and no kill potential in ranged form, high yet preparation-dependent burst in melee form), and tie in both her forms through her Spiderlings, in a way that both gates the use of her on-demand transformation and takes care of their current issues (namely, being fiddly to control, hard to play against, and deceptively good at providing Elise with a degree of tankiness). Thematically, I want to make Elise a true web-spinner: her human form is supposed to be seductive and seemingly fragile, and I want her to lure her victims into her trap and "prepare" them in ranged form, before switching to her spider form and eating them alive.

Pets
What are your thoughts? Would you like Elise's kit to be changed in this way? Do you agree that Elise needs a change? If so, what would be your take on her?