Kayle Rework

I know I’ve posted things here and there about the kayle rework, but shurelia has given tons more details recently so I’m making a new post for them. Here is a fairly specific plan for her rework:

Holy Fervor

Holy Fervor is a problematic spell from a design standpoint since it grants a player a large amount of selfish, bonus gold. While it may not seem problematic at the surface, this causes the character to have to be intentionally a lot weaker in the early stages of the game and incentivizes hard farm to the point that the character’s gold bonus causes them to quickly snowball out of control. We see the same problem with Jax who becomes intentionally weak early with the exception of stacking runes of the free-gold type. Overall we would like to remove these types of passives from the game whenever possible.

Reckoning

Reckoning was an ability intended to help Kayle sustain DPS onto a target, however since the missile speed was incredibly slow, the effect had some trouble kicking in when you really wanted it to. Because of this we increased the missile speed by about 30%, in addition the increased slow amount should help contribute more to “supportive type” players.

Divine Blessing

This change reflects the direction we would like to take support-type characters in. Our intention is for all support-characters to have dual-type builds based on purchased items. The base values of Divine Blessing increasing, will greatly help supportive characters (who want to not compete for farm with their teammates), and lowering the AP ratios in compensation enables support-types to purchase more team-centric items (which we intend on introducing more of).

The increase in mana cost also creates a heavier attrition state in the early game, meaning that player cannot simply spam to stay in lane. Doing so should run the player out of mana which forces them back. (We have the same intent towards all other types of this as well). So while this IS a nerf for offensive type characters support power, we are compensating with reduced costs to their offensive types abilities, which we DO want people to spam. Since supportive-types can also itemize regen heavily, this will be less detrimental to them. I can write a whole article on this so I’ll leave it at that for now.

The movement speed was also changed to a long duration MS buff to a burst MS buff, which feels a lot more clutch in a defensive sense and is much stronger for engaging a fight as well.

Righteous Fury

The cooldown was reduced drastically on this spell to help with its total uptime. This will really help Kayle in the early laning phase. In addition, the mana cost was also reduced so you should never feel bad about using it!

The intent of the spell is for Kayle to be much more powerful than a standard carry (early) in combat power with the spell active in addition to using Reckoning, but weaker without it. The counter-gameplay is to try to bait the Kayle’s Righteous Fury.

With the cooldown reductions and 40% CDR (Which is core.) The spell should have 100% uptime, which will greatly contribute to teamfights.

The damage was also increased and the range, to really give it that “ranged carry power” that it deserves.

She still benefits from hybrid items here, since she gains damage from both AP/AD and hybrid items have superior gold efficiency due to the odd stat combinations. (not to mention more damage on your Qs)

Intervention

No changes here, with the exception of a possible mana cost reduction. The spell should function as a team utility-saver for support-types, and a Tryndamere-esque ulti for attacker-types.

New Passive

Currently Kayle’s new passive gives her a rageblade style armor/magic pen buff. This should greatly help out Kayle since its difficult for her to itemize penetration with her optimized build paths for hybrid items. In addition, for a supportive twist, anytime she casts a spell on an ally she “throws” the buff onto them as well, temporarily granting her targeted ally her passive.

About why they chose not to make her E (righteous fury) not a toggle:

The reason for this is there is less incentive to turn it off ever if it is a toggle. This is why a lot of toggles have ramping mana costs, but if you make her E have a ramping mana cost it will drain your mana very hard in times you need it the most. In addition we like the counterplay during the laning phase of baiting out the E.

The other thought on this is to make it a toggle “drain on hit” which deincentivizes attack speed, which sorta feels weird

About why they didn’t make her a ranged champ:

It’s a little weird for a character with a sword to be a basic ranged attacker.

That being said, it makes a little bit more sense when her sword ignites on fire and she sets people ablaze with each hit.

From Phreak:

The reasoning for the change on the heal:

Having a 30% movement speed haste instead of 12 lets you make an ally escape. Trust me, that works really, really well. You only need 4 seconds. That’s a significant buff. Significant.

Nerfing the mana cost means Kayle can’t sit there babysitting in lane and full heal a teammate for no effort. Realize that the mana costs for everything else went down so standard combat Kayle doesn’t really have any mana cost changes.

Here is some good insight into the direction they are trying to push kayle, as well as other supports according to Shurelia’s posts above:

One of the major problems with Kayle is that she can really do everything. With the nerf, if you stack AP, you don’t support quite as hard. DPS Kayle doesn’t need to itemize mana to deal tons of damage. If she chooses to support, she’ll run out.

Support Kayle will have items like Shurelya’s and is more likely to take MP5 yellows/blues over AP yellows/blues. She also won’t be spamming E on cooldown. Support Kayle can stomach the greater mana cost.

This means that support Kayle heals more than AP Kayle. We saw what happened when we gave an AP caster a strong heal AP ratio: Nidalee is kinda ridiculous. If Cougar form didn’t suck in a teamfight, she’d be the best champion in the game. Considering she only has two combat abilities now, and is a strong tournament pick, that’s saying a lot.