I've been waiting a few days since the release of Eve's nerfs to make a post about it. I wanted to play her a few times as well as see her be played while collecting opinions from players in game and out.

For those who want to skip the big blocks of text:

Evelynn's ult nerf now prevents her from playing as an assassin. Evelynn is punished for fighting an enemy at less than full HP. On the other hand, Evelynn's damage output through Hate Spike, because of it's DoT nature, encourages low HP targets to prevent runners. Her kit is at odds with each other.

Right now, Eve's only course of action is to build herself as an imitator, as dictated by her ultimate, against her core gameplay thematic. Eve needs CDR, HP and Tenacity to play effectively as her ult now punishes her for waiting until the fight is safe for her to engage. She is expected to join the battle quickly at the start and use her ult before the enemies have lost too much HP. Eve now has to choose what portion of her ult she wants most; Damage, Shield, or Slow. She no longer has the option of combining two or all three parts to their peak effectiveness.

Damage: If Eve chooses to focus her ult for Damage on a critically important target, she can no longer afford to wait for the target to be near other targets to get additional shielding or CC. As well, by ulting early, the slow's effectiveness is greatly reduced in teamfight situations. As well, by ulting early, Eve exposes herself and her position to the enemy. Finally, she must enter the battle immediately, otherwise she wastes her shield. When building for damage, this is ineffective, as despite the shield she will be bursted with little trouble. This play feels bad to the player because you lose all utility on the spell and are forced to engage before you want to.

Shield: If Eve chooses to use her ult to get peak shield effectiveness, she sacrifices a massive portion of damage to do so. In normal teamfight situations, it will take proper positioning and waiting for the right moment to ensure that your ult hits multiple targets for your shield. Now, she cannot expect even damage across each champion hit; this gives her ult a feeling of randomness that she can't control. By choosing defense, you are sacrificing the more important aspects of the ult; the damage and the CC. This play feels bad to the player because you sacrifice your damage, eve's primary purpose.

Slow: If Eve chooses to use her ult for the slow, she sacrifices her damage in similar ways to using it for the shield. Again, this makes her ult feel almost random when hitting multiple targets. She doesn't have control of the damage output of the ultimate because of the Current HP method of damage. As well, the shield portion of the spell is largely wasted. This play feels bad to the player because the slow is ineffectual at early ranks against any target with a displacement ability like Flash, Quickdraw, etc and because the spell is now incapable of dealing ANY damage to a low HP target that you are trying to slow to finish the job.



Primary Points:
Eve's ult feels like it has no "optimal" play choice in any situation.
Eve's ult feels random due to the inability to do a predictable amount of damage
Eve's ult cannot combine all three aspects of the ult together: Damage, Slow, or shield.
Eve no longer feels like an assassin; her kit directs her as an initiator.
Eve has no ability to "Secure" or "Execute" any target with a dash, flash, or jump.



I do not argue against any of the other nerfs, however the changes to her ult make Eve a different breed of champion who is largely ineffectual at any role past ganking lanes who don't pink ward.

Actually i feel it is more akin to old Eve... Where she had to use her ult as a means to initiate... or escape

Evelynn's rework changed the foundation of her character get used to it.

She still works fine as an Assassin. I wish her ult had a base damage amount, so ulting somebody who is on 1HP would actually kill them, but you know; you can just ult their team at the start of a fight and then let the rest of your team fold in?

You don't have to hit R and then immediately rush headlong into the foray. Though granted, it does make me feel the shield portion of her ult is part the reason they nerfed the damage, and it's pretty useless now outside of a 1v1 capacity.

That's a big part of my point. Her ult now feels bad to use; use it early, lose out on your
CC and shield. Use it late, lose your damage, forced to choose between CC or shield. But do you need the shield if you're going in late? and if you're going for the slow, don't you need the damage too, to attempt to finish off a target?

55% -> 47% winrate
http://www.lolking.net/champions/evelynn#statistics

well, i thought she would hit 44%, still obviously overnerfed

generally always thought of her as a bruiser/assassin. You go in after the primary tank (or just ult and then wait a second for the tank to get in there after your slow).

There's just...so much waste in saving such a large nuke for an execute, even back when it did %max.

I mentioned this in my own thread, but Eve was an assassin who, even when she was an assassin, relied heavily on DFG to perform assassinations due to the sustained damage nature of her kit, and that was mostly due to the synergy with her ult. With her ult now changed to be based on current health, she is stuck between having the kit of a mage-carry (like Vlad) and that of an assassin. To my mind, since Riot has stated that the only problem they see with her kit atm is her ult. they should change it to fit one of these elements.

The issue from a balance perspective was that Eve snowballs really hard from early kills, and even if she got shut down in lane, she could use it to clean up a team fight and get herself back in the game. I can understand that being a tricky situation, but the same can be said of any clean-up Assassin.

Personally, I always used it to initiate, unless it was the only way to secure a kill which whould otherwise have escaped. Those situations were rare enough for it to not feel like an issue to me.

i wish that they would giver a minimun damage like 250 or 300, not much, i can take the nerf on cd, but not having a minimun damage thershold its too much