User blog:Willbachbakal/(Champion Rework) Kalista, the Spear of Vengeance

This is a tentative rework for Kalista, the Spear of Vengeance. In terms of novelty, Kalista has a lot going for her that is unique: she has an orbwalking paradigm like no other, unparalleled ally synergy, and a really cool vision contribution. Problem is, she's also a bloated mess: her kit is massively overloaded with different mechanics, actives, passives (she has 4 passives in total) and conditionals, many of which are redundant, and none of which contribute that much to kit depth. In fact, she usually has so many options at her disposal that she can at least moderately succeed at any choice she makes, which I think is the opposite of depth (choices need to be meaningful). On top of this, there's a lot to her that is supremely irritating: her perma-jump makes it impossible to fight her as a melee champion most of the time, her Black Spear ritual, while not directly a gameplay feature, is tremendously disruptive, and her Rend allows her to upstage her own jungler, among a great deal many other annoyances. She has no clear identity, and what she does well often comes at a major cost in enjoyment to all other parties involved, including her own allies. On top of this, she is so difficult to balance that Riot has resorted to piling even more bizarre effects onto her kit, namely the recent atrocious nerf to her autoattack scaling: she is one of the very few champions out there who has had an explicit malus added to her kit just to balance her, the others being (reduced critical damage),  (reduced attack wind-up bonuses from attack speed) and  (cannot crit on her first attack).

Behind the heap of obnoxious, ridiculous and occasionally nonsensical mechanics, though, there is a champion who has the potential to genuinely shine as a totally unique marksman. Her kiting is pretty broken right now, but for all the wrong reasons, and could potentially be made a lot more functional. Her ally synergy, which has often been overshadowed by her more technical power, deserves to be brought out more, as does her unique utility. Basically, if she were streamlined a ton, I feel she could have much more depth and be much more fun to play, play with and play against. I think if Kalista had to have a niche, it would be as the game's best defensive marksman (she has great team synergy, kiting and static objective control), and the following changes are intended to condense her kit into that identity.

Pets
What do you think of the above changes? Admittedly, this is the most recent of live champions/champion reworks that I decided to do a custom rework for, but I feel sufficiently enough time has passed to acknowledge that Kalista needs some serious changes to her kit (the recent attempts at balancing her are also evidence in support of this, in my opinion). Do you think these changes would solve Kalista's issues? If not, what am I missing? What would you want to change or keep on her live kit, and the above kit?