So as many of you know Nidalee is my favorite and probably best champion. If you don't know well now you do. Most of the games you see me play Nidalee I do pretty well, although I'll admit I do lose with her from time to time, and she certainly has her counters. But like all specialist players you can make champiosn work even against hard counters, although I will admit this is a less frequent occurrence lately as Nidalee seems to be falling off popularity as people have moved on from FOTM AD Nid and she's generally not regarded as a strong pick anymore, especially not AP. While I've been somewhat resilient to accept these facts, I can admit it is true that Nidalee is not a strong pick, but I believe that you can make virtually any champion work if you try hard enough. I've been in experimenting with different runes, masteries, and builds and have generally found what I've liked and disliked however, there is still no denying she has some major flaws at the moment. In this blog post I wanted to discuss some possible changes that I would like to see and why. There was a thread in the 'Theorycrafting' section about changes to Nidalee following the release of Jayce but those changes I see highly unlikely.

So one of the main issues for Nidalee is her passive laning and poor follow up. While this is probably impossible to change without drastically changing her, she is fairly pointless to gank for pre-6 and to try and gank post-6. While this isn't always a problem, levels 1-5 she is incredibly weak, and her only source of real damage is through auto-attacks, and possibly Javelin Toss if it's rank 3+ or you manage to land a far rank 2 spear. It's not guaranteed damage anyway, so the element of human error is present. Her traps do pretty fantastic damage at level 1, but after that they fall off hard until you get a pretty large pool of AP and rank them up a bit. The armor/MR shred is fairly negligible mid game when champions in general still haven't built any defenses but it's because pretty substantial late game. In addition, her spear isn't really worth using until rank 3+. So these are just a few problems, now what am I suggesting is the next question:

• Increase the early game damage on Javelin Toss, make it worth while to use at ranks 1 and 2. Currently at rank 1 it deals 55 damage with a .65 ratio (negligible early on) and based on range. But after factoring in resistances it will probably hit for less than an auto-attack, assuming you even land it at all. Rank 2 isn't that much better, it hits for 95 damage, after factoring in resistances it's probably only going to hit for 80-90 damage which is hardly higher than an auto-attack. As you can see, the damage on it really starts to snowball later in the game when she gets rank 3+ and due to the fairly high ratio. I think the late game damage on Nidalee spear is fine, the problem is the early game damage makes it not even worth using. It's better to run up and auto-attack than use a spear, it's almost even punishing to use a spear because it's pretty much a waste of mana. And that's if you land the spear and is affected by the distance of the spear.
  
• Trap is fine in my oppinion, the % armor and MR shred is high but kind of weak early levels because it is percentage based but it actually hits pretty hard later in the game, I'd leave it alone at the moment. The only change I'd consider making is reducing the duration of traps to 3.5 minutes from 4 minutes, but reducing the cooldown to 14 seconds as opposed to 18. While this could be considered a minor nerf because you will be getting .5 less traps out, it will allow you to spam more traps and quicker, because while many people don't consider this, traps are a Nidalee's only defense against heavy pushing early on. While she does have great wave clear post-6; pre-6 it's actually incredibly weak. This will also allow her to pump out more traps during the laning phase and make it easier for her to detect ganks. I also recommend this change because I'm personally not a fan of traps and objects sitting on the ground for an extended period of time. 3.5 minutes is still incredibly long and in the grand scheme of thing it isn't a major change but when you have things stock piled on the ground it can get ridiculous (i'm looking at you 10 minute shroom teemo). I'm not really sure if I want this change, but I think it's worth suggesting.
  
• Nidalees heal right now is attrocious. Primal Surge has incredibly low base heal and a pretty high mana cost. In fact her heal is one of the highest in the game for heals. If I remember correctly it's slightly lower than Soraka's heal cost but slightly higher than Taric's. And while it's true it has a fantastic ratio, especially for a heal, it's pretty negligible in lane. It heals for 50 then 85 while costing 60/80/100/etc mana each time after. By rank 3 alone it costs 100 mana, and if you max heal first like so many Nidalee players do, 100 mana at level 5 is incredibly crippling to a mana pool. The change I'd like to see is a curved scaling mana cost. The higher you rank it the more it costs, while ranks 1 and 2 it can remain fairly low. You really aren't getting that much health at rank 1 and 2, so I'm not sure why it costs so much. I'd like to see a mana cost look something like 45/60/90/120/140, I feel like this curve would more appropriately fit the amount being healed. And while I understand riot's logic for not liking sustain, Nidalee is already a passive laner, she's currently even more passive because she can't afford to spend mana to constantly heal herself. Given these changes I think we'd see more aggressive Nidalee play.
  
• I've long said Aspect Of The Cougar's passive armor and magic resist is incredibly underwhelming 10/20/30 MR and Armor is pretty laughable. Consider that Taric's Shatter gives him 20 mana at rank, and he can take it at level 1, he's getting as much armor as a level 11 Nidalee in cougar form. While you do also get MR, we're talking about Nidalee's ultimate here. And while I know it's important to be cautious when buffing passive stats, the passive armor and MR are a joke. You currently get 466 gold worth of armor and 462.5 gold worth of MR coming out to 928.5 total gold worth of stats compared to someone like Taric who gets essentially 1000 gold worth of armor and he can achieve this buy level 9, Nidalee can't even achieve this until level 16. While I think Aspect Of The Cougar makes Nidalee extremely strong at level 6 and generally throughout the mid game, it falls off late because the risk vs. reward is so incredibly low. If she wants to use cougar late game she has to build fairly tanky while there is a damage trade-off, and because only her auto-attacks and takedown scale off AD, she's going to fall off if she builds bruiser. I suggest buffing her Armor and MR to 20/35/50. While this would be a substantial increase, I doubt much would change in the grand scheme of things. She still wouldn't be tanky enough late game to justify using cougar and while she'd be tankier if you went bruiser you would still lack general damage. In fact I think she'd be on-par with many bruisers with this buff. There is another change I'd like to see to Aspect Of The Cougar however I will address it in the 'Pounce' section because it will make more sense.
  
• takedown is wonderful, leave it the same
  
• Pounce damage is decent early on while it falls off later, I'm fairly okay with this. it's a leap not a damage tool. Although I think giving it a .2 bonus AD ratio would be okay, if this change wasn't implemented I don't think much would change. Now the major change I'd like to see is make Aspect Of The Cougar unaffected by unit collision. This would be a huge quality of life change because it would allow her to Pounce without being affected by minions that force her to pounce another way. If this change would be too much, then I suggest allowing players to smartcast pounce to allow Nidalee to pounce in the direction of the players cursor. This would be a huge quality of life change, and in my opinion a well deserved one. This can be so costly for some players it really only makes sense, and many Nidalee players have been asking for this for years.
  
• Swipe is fine, it can be left alone
  
• Prowl can seem somewhat underwhelming so if anything I'd increase the buff duration to 3 seconds

More or less these are the changes I'd like to see that I think would greatly increase her viability. I don't know how much stronger they would make her, I highly doubt she would be competitive with tier 1 top picks, but this at least brings her closer to being able to hold her own rather than being a victim of virtually every lane. To me it only makes sense that she gets buffed, we've seen the release of Darius and Jayce, a Xin Zhao rework and a Garen rework. I don't want a Nidalee rework but I'd like to see a numbers overhaul to bring her in line with other champions, or at least closer than she currently is.

Love to hear opinions on the matter because I'm certainly not bias as a Nidalee player


http://na.leagueoflegends.com/board/showthread.php?p=28771914#post28771914

please comment on that thread, and preferably upvote :P