Wednesday, April 10, 2013

Ezreal - QoL + AP Viability

Lots of people like Ezreal.  He's a fun champion with skill shots and an interesting poke/burst playstyle while you lane.  But he's seen the nerf bat quite a bit recently and it's left him in a bit of a pinch on the AD side.  As for AP, it's never been quite right for as long as I've been playing LoL.

So, I have two possible changes in mind on how to change Ezreal to make his ADC role a little less post nerf lackluster and make AP Ezreal a little more viable.

1.  Make Ezreal's W, Essence Flux, hit minions as well as champions.

Now, this seems like a slightly insignificant buff for AD Ezreal, but in reality this can be Quite a big change because of his passive.  By making Essence Flux hit minions, with one spell he can go from 0 stacks of his passive attack speed to maximum stacks of 5.  That means that he'll have more on demand attack speed without needing to use his ult like many of the other ADCs (Graves, Trist, Draven, MF, etc).

For AP Ezreal this will be a massive change.  He'll be able to actually wave clear and push back against champions that would otherwise shove him under turret and make him lose cs/let them roam with ease.

Now, for the sake of balance, a few different adjustments could be done with this change.  For instance there could be a diminishing damage component to Essence Flux per target hit such as with Sivir and Cait's Qs.  Or Essence Flux could have a cap of 1-2 stacks of his passive from minions to avoid early game attack speed problems (Possibly make it 1 per rank so at max rank hitting a wave stacks it to 5 but at rank 1 it's only 1 for the minions and 1 per champ).

2.  Give Ezreal's E a slight change so that it targets champions over minions within a certain radius.

Now I know that Ezreal was meant to be a skill shot champion and that's his shtick, but this change could be really nice for AP Ezreal in general and early-mid game AD Ezreal for his burst.

I'm not saying that if he Es in anywhere remotely close to a champion the bolt should home in on them, only that within a certain range, perhaps the size of Rivan's W, her stun, if there is a champion in that radius that the bolt will hit them and not the creeps that he/she's hugging.

Essentially this change will make AD Ezreal's laning a little more solid early on (Which it should be considering his late game isn't the bee's knees) and it will give AP Ezreal more of a chance to properly land his E in lane where now the enemy can simply sit next to some minions and avoid a good number of them without much thought.

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