That about says it. Seriously, is there a reason why someone would want a Kassadin on their team? About all he can do is kill steal. If you see a Kassadin with a lot of kills, it's only because he happens to be very good at kill stealing, but not at getting them to that point.

PERSPECTIVE TIME! Lets compare the champion, Kassadin, in his entirety, to, say, Ashe's ultimate, nothing else, just her ultimate.

Kassadin scenario: An enemy is low on HP, and is escaping. Out goes Kassadin, warping closer, closer, slow, silence, a bit of mana drain, kill.

Ashe ultimate scenario. An enemy is low on HP, and is escaping. Out goes the ultimate, flying fast, closer, hits and kills.

Yes, Ashe's arrow has to hit, but Kassadin also has to survive, it's a gamble whether he'll catch up without getting ganked or not, not to mention he can't go into the base with his low HP and squishyness.

In conclusion, as is, Kassadin as a whole champion, all his abilities included, is about as useful as one single ability.

Why do I bring this up? I like Kassadin, and occasionally try to play him with a group of friends, but really the only reason to play him is because I like him. If you're in a 5 man premade, against a 5 man premade, nobody would want him in a strategically put together team because the entire champion of four abilities can be replaced by a single ability. As for his silence, yeah, useful, but your average stun not only keeps the target from using abilities, but also from moving. Lasts about as long too.

Yes, there is a bit of exaggerating, but does anyone else see my point?

I'm sorry, but I just don't see how a champion with a fast cooldown teleport that does AOE damage, an AOE slow that hits pretty hard, and a spammy, decent damage silence is anything bad. Not only does he not just killsteal, he can jump out, gank an enemy from full to dead, and disappear over a wall in seconds... granted the mana drain is pretty useless, but his other abilities are pretty amazing, and his passive, even if you are doing an AP build, reduces all ability damage used on you by 15 percent... what?

kassadin is one of my main champs and i just love his burst damage combined with the omg you wont get me part. what i rly would like to see is some buff/remake for his ether blade cause srsly who plays a atk speed kassa. nothing big just maybe that his spells also drain some mana or give him mana dunno something like that.

dude you've obviously nvr played witha good kassadin. my AP build kassadin was wrecking ppl when he was free, gaining tons of mana to spam my ulti for the constant extra damage which is aoe btw tore ppl up. kassadin has a silence and a slow as well as a blink. hes one of the most powerful champs, but no one knows how to use him.

He may not contribute like Fiddles on a team fight but he is the best chaser in the game

Plus the fact that his E does a pretty good damage with a low cooldown


The only thing he need is a way to make his W useful

His W definitely needs to be looked at.

As an avid Kassadin fan/player I agree with most of whats being said here but lets look at it realistically.

Passive - Its bad. I understand the devs wanted him to have melee dps potential but it will never work. The -15% is nice and all but seriously, 15% of 1000 damage is only 150. Meaning if you get hit you're still pretty much dead. Kass thrives by not getting hit at all, so while some mitigation is nice, its completely unnecessary. I dont even need to explain why the 2nd half of that skill is bad.

Q - Is great, spammable damage with a silence. Not the best 'anti-mage' spell but it works wonders.

W - Absolutely worthless. No decent Kass player gets more than one level of this before he absolutely has to. Kass is not a melee dps (even if he was intended to be one) and without a complete revamp of his skill set he never will be. You cannot give him enough hp/survivability with that much nuke power and have him be balanced.

E - Great skill. Range is a little small and the charging up part is a pain but the trade-offs balance it nicely.

R - Overrated. Yes I said it. Its good for one thing and one thing only, moving quickly. If you try to initiate with it, you will be cc'd and killed instantly. Try to build up charges with it and congrats you just blew your entire mana pool for a mediocre nuke with a tiny aoe. It's good for getting away from a fight and for chasing down low hp heroes. That being said its still a great skill and fits his style very well.

Back to the topic: What does Kass need...Imo, he only needs one thing

A way to FARM

He severely lacks in this department. I mean SEVERELY. It also self-balances. If a Kass player wants to farm creeps then their enemy farming potential is weakened. IF they want to kill players, their creep farming potential is lessened. Easy Peezy.

That coupled with the fact that just about anything else would tip the balance scales and result in a nerf to his other skills making him less fun and less effective. He cannot be give more nuke damage, he will scale to well with ap builds. Cant give him more survivability he will just stand there and melt faces. More usefullness in teamfights would lead to the forums overflowing with cries of OP OP OP. More mana burn/drain skills have potential, but again its not really something he NEEDS and I think it would still result in nerfs to his other skills.

Please, please, whatever you do, don't nerf his other skills. I would rather have the current incarnation than have another skill tossed in at the expense of the awesomeness we have now.

~My 17 cents
sry for text wall :/

He's not bad, but he's a bit like Eve in that his main gimmick, Rift Walk, is much, much better against bad players than it is against good ones.

Part of the problem here is the ubiquity of flash, but it's simply hard to think of a group of four other champions that would prefer having a Kassadin to having an Annie or a Fiddlesticks.

Annie is the most directly comparable. From levels 1 to 5, she's categorically better. Both have a single-target nuke and a cone nuke. Kass' silence isn't hugely useful when laning, Annie can spam her fireball for farming as well as harassing, and Annie periodically has a stun, which allows her to much more easily get her Incinerate off (whereas Kass has big problems hitting heroes early on with Force Pulse). Annie is a much better farmer and a better harasser.

I don't think anyone would argue that Kassadin can stand up to Annie through mid-game either. Sure, Kass gets Rift Walk at 6, and this makes it much easier for him to chase and to get his Force Pulse off. But Annie gets Tibbers. And Annie isn't stupid, so she also has flash. If the other team would let Kass occasionally teleport-gank them, then Annie would absolutely destroy them.

Late-game, things get really one-sided. Without having been ridiculously fed, both Kass' and Annie's damage outputs suffer relative to the carries on both teams. At this point, Kassadin basically stops contributing to team fights except for the occasional silence. He hasn't gotten a level in a useful skill other than Rift Walk since level 12, and he can't approach a team fight without using Rift Walk. Either he's tanky enough to survive, in which case he's not doing any damage at all, or he's got the AP but gets torn to shreds between Rift Walk cooldowns. Annie, on the other hand, can open with a Tibbers stun, catching at least two people and often more. She'll have Molten Shield up, which gives her much more damage resistance than Kass' passive. And if she plays it right, she'll have a second stun ready around the time Kass' second Rift Walk would be off cooldown.

Now, Kass still has a place early on and mid-game, but he's outclassed so badly by Annie late-game that I just don't see him as a competitive choice anymore. Some more farming ability would help enormously, but he also badly needs some team utility other than a single-target, slow-moving silence and an aoe movement-only slow.

Edit: I should note that the new experience system screws Kassadin somewhat. Before, if you hit level 6 and got a double-kill in your lane, and proceeded to run around the map ganking like crazy, you'd end up several levels up on your opponents and you'd be able to steamroll them. That's much harder now, and you don't get the level advantage that you really need to do that - Kassadin is really not that good at ganking equal-level opponents. Annie has a much easier time with this, because she's not as reliant on having a level advantage over the people she's fighting.