Fixing AP Evelynn's Feel

Hello Everyone,

In this post I would like to discuss a small change to Evelynn which I believe would help make her playable again.

Since her remake, Evelynn has went down quite the strange road of nerfs and buffs. Initially she was considered weak, and buffed repeatedly. Then it was discovered just how OP she was, especially with the old deathfire grasp, and she then had to be nerfed repeatedly, along with deathfire grasp.


So, after all of these nerfs, Evelynn has been put into a state where she is generally viable, but hardly ever used and definitely cannot play how she used to. The biggest change that I would like to note is the change of her ult from %max health to %current health.

Personally, I actually welcome this change, because as much fun as Evelynn was with %max health damage, it was just too strong. However, I feel as though having it deal % current health just makes it too weak, unless you initiate the fight with it.

However, you should not be initiating fights as Evelynn; you should be wandering around, waiting for the perfect change to strike at one of the enemy squishies, preferably the AD Carry. But, in the time you wait to do this, many of your targets will have already taken a decent chunk of damage. This means that by the time you wait for the perfect moment to strike, you have already missed out on a lot of potential damage.

Another thing that I would like to note is that Evelynn's ult was designed with the intention of being an initiation ult, not an executing ult, so I will avoid any interesting changes like making it be %missing health instead of current.

So, this leaves me with two options that I can think of for making Evelynn feel better when using her ult properly. The first change is to give the ultimate a minimum damage dealt, similar to Mundo's Q. After all, it makes no sense that your big powerful aoe nuke ultimate cannot actually kill anything. I really don't care how Riot tries to make it sound like it's not so bad. It is bad. It is supposed to be a powerful aoe nuke, and powerful aoe nukes should be capable of killing things. That is my expectation as a player, and is also the expectation of many other players from what I have read on the forums about this.

My second Proposed change would be to make the ability deal a flat amount of damage plus a (smaller) %current health. This essentially is meant to have the same feel as with the first change, but it weakens the spell against tanky targets, while buffing it against squishy targets, which are Evelynn's target as an assassin. Part of the problem with Evelynn's ult with %max health was that it did so much damage to high health targets, but with this change, that would be less of an issue.

Now I am not sure which of these changes would be best in practice, but I feel as though they both put Evelynn into a better state than she is in now, and make her a more fun champion to play.

What does everyone else think? Let me know in the comments!

Until next time!
"Your pain is my pleasure"
-Rikukun

edit 4/18/2013: Of course a few days after this post, Evelynn actually gets used twice int he LCS. However, my point that Evelynn's ult lacks the fun element that it should have still stands, and I still feel that these changes would be good for her overall.