How to Fix Shaco

Shaco is a champion that Riot has had a really hard time balancing over the years. He is the kind of champion who has a bag full of tricks that are designed to mess with your opponent, confusing them. These tricks have time and again made Shaco into a great champion in solo queue, allowing him to crush uncoordinated or unsuspecting players. Basically, with his free Blink + stealth, boxes to fear people all over the place or in stacks, and a clone minion that he can completely control and fool players with Shaco has a bunch of frustrating and difficult mechanics that you have to deal with at once and requires coordination to deal with effectively. High level teams are obviously very coordinated and can deal with Shaco with ease, which is why he is not viable there. However, most solo queue teams will lack this coordination, and will therefore be unable to deal with his tricks.

This leaves Shaco in an odd position. Either he is strong enough for competitive play, but is then a must ban in solo queue, or he is completely unviable in competitive play to where he is manageable in solo queue. Alternatively, he has also at times been in an in between place, where he is very difficult to manage in solo queue, but high level teams can still deal with him with ease.

Right now, Shaco is in the second position that I mentioned above. He is viable in Solo Queue, but I would be shocked to see him played in the LCS unless some changes happen.

So what changes must happen in order for us to see Shaco in the LCS without seeing him permabanned in solo queue? To see this, let us first analyze Shaco's kit.

His Passive: Shaco deals 20% bonus damage when striking a unit from behind with his autoattacks or abilities.

His Q: ACTIVE: Shaco instantly blinks to a target nearby location and enters stealth for up to 3.5 seconds. His next auto-attack within 6 seconds is guaranteed to critically strike for modified base critical damage. Bonus critical damage from items, runes and mastery is applied for the full amount.

His W: ACTIVE: Shaco creates a Jack in the Box at the target location with 150 health. It will stealth after 2 seconds and lasts a maximum of 60 seconds. When an enemy comes near the box activates and comes out of stealth, fearing nearby enemies briefly and attacking them for 5 seconds, dealing magic damage with its attacks. Casting Jack In The Box breaks stealth.

His E: PASSIVE: Shaco's attacks poison his targets, reducing their movement speed for 2 seconds. It also gives affected non-champion units a chance to miss their attacks.
ACTIVE: Shaco throws a dagger at a target enemy dealing magic damage and applying his slowing poison to them for 3 seconds. The passive is deactivated during the cooldown.

and finally His Ult: ACTIVE: Shaco becomes stealthed and untargetable for 0.5 seconds, then creates a clone of himself that will last for up to 18 seconds. The clone deals 75% of Shaco's damage and receives 50% extra damage. This clone deals 50% damage to towers and inhibitors. At the end of its duration or when dying the clone will explode, dealing magic damage to nearby enemies.

From this, let us look closely at the abilities that are a part of his bag of tricks. These are his Q, W, and Ult. His Q gives him a free flash and stealth for a few seconds. His W gives him boxes he can place that CC his enemies and deal damage (significant damage if built AP) and his ult gives him a clone that deals 75% of Shacos auto attack damage, applies on hit effects, and explodes for extra damage on death.

Now, my idea for how to balance shaco is to change part of his bag of tricks. This will allow Shaco to be strong in other areas, which will help with the goal of making him strong enough for competitive play. It will also nerf what makes him such a solo queue destroyer when he is strong. So both of his issues can be fixed at once.


So, what part of his kit do we hit, and how do we approach these changes? There are a few things to keep in mind when deciding what to do. First of all, we want to try and keep Shaco feeling like Shaco. Many players would reject changes that make him not feel like he has always felt (like with the recent Karma changes), so any changes that drastically change his play style should be avoided if possible. Well, that means that we cannot rework his Q or Ultimate, since they are such key components to how you play as Shaco. We could number tweak them, but that is something that Riot has already done, and it does not fix his core design problems.

So this leaves his W, the boxes, as the area to fix. Changing his boxes also makes a lot of sense since they often are useless in actual combat, and are pretty much useless late game to AD Shaco anyways, besides a potential fear from a bush, or for kiting. So here is my proposal for how to change Shaco's W.

First of all, you can no longer place multiple boxes at a time. You will place one larger box at a time. It will stealth much faster than boxes do now, and use a health system similar to that of Zyra's plants (perhaps taking less damage from neutral monsters/minions). It will still fear in the same way that it does now, and afterwards it will prioritize champions to attack, specially the last one you attacked within the past few seconds if you did attack one. It will disappear after a few seconds just as it does now. It will have about the same base value as a box does right now. The ap ratio will be adjusted (likely buffed) as needed. However, this box will also now scale with a percentage of your bonus AD and bonus Attack speed.



So what will this change do for Shaco's kit from a design standpoint? First of all, Shaco's boxes no longer have to be balanced around whether or not you are stacking them. This allows for it to be a much stronger minion, for both AP and AD Shaco when you place just a single one. Secondly, it will make it so that Shaco will never be able to do silly things in the jungle such as clear camps while not even being there with his boxes as he has been able to do at times in the past. Lastly, it makes AD Shaco feel much better for using his W late game, and adds in more decision making when it comes to where to place your box, instead of just places boxes everywhere. Shaco's basic theme and playstyle are even kept, and to be honest, I feel that his late game playstyle will be amplified by this change, at least if you are playing agressively as AD. His playstyle as AP Shaco will be changed a bit, but in my personal opinion (however valuable that is) Making AP Shaco being able to do more than stack boxes and hope that someone is foolish enough to walk into a stack of them is a good change for him.

Now with these changes, there will also need to be a lot of number tweaking to all of shaco's abilities, in order to keep AP viable (which will be much easier without having to worry about box stacking cases) and to make sure his numbers stay in check. However, I feel that changing his boxes in this sort of way would put Shaco in a much better position for being balanceable at all levels of play, and keep him feeling like Shaco at the same time.

Feel free to leave comments if you have any suggestions, or critiques of my idea! All constructive feedback is welcome here!

Until next time!

"For my next trick, I'll make you disappear!"

-Rikukun

edit1: Updated parts of the post based on feedback from comments.