LoL: Are Kayn Players Just Too Bad To Build?
Kayn has been a champion that players absolutely love and hate. Most players that love him, play him and most players that hate him, play against him. The champion has two forms that either make him a bruiser or an assassin. Both of these forms are viable, but lately, the assassin Kayn has been widely overperforming.
Kayn is a very adaptable champion. Depending on the enemy team comp he can opt for a tanky approach, or he can play as an assassin that almost completely ignores walls and strikes from the shadows.
While at his release the Darkin Bruiser form was much stronger than his assassin counterpart, Shadowkayn has always been more popular to play.
In Season 14 Shadow Kayn was basically the only viable form of the two as Riot Games has recently removed Goredrinker which was Darkin Kayn's best item. Alongside the removal of mythic items, we got a new lethality hydra variant called Profane Hydra.
The Golden Age Of Kayn With Profane Hydra
This item alone made every single assassin viable. It gives amazing wave clear and a great execute spike when engaging on enemies.
Obviously, this item is great for Shadow Kayn. The built-in Tiamat helps with the jungle clear and an extra damage source before the ult is incredibly strong. Not to mention that the item was insanely broken on release anyway.
So time goes on and Profane Hydra gets eventually nerfed. Every assassin in higher elo drops a good amount of win rate, and we enter the Azir/Ahri meta. In lower elo brackets such as gold and platinum, however, assassins are still okay mostly because players don't know how to effectively counter or itemize against them.
For a while, Kayn was actually the worst jungler in the entire game, especially in lower elos and especially because they kept buying the nerfed Profane Hydra. Sure, the item still provided a great amount of help when clearing the jungle, but after all it wasn't a great damage item anymore.
Riot Stepped In
Riot Games saw this and understood that Kayn looked a bit weak. Darkin Kayn has been underperforming for several patches and as such got a few buffs that were very helpful. Because players still insisted on playing the assassin variant with bad items, Riot has decided to step in another time and removed the Q - Hydra interaction.
This was meant to make the combo clunkier and less user-friendly so that Kayn players would start building other items. As it turns out, Shadow Kayn was actually fine with other lethality items, but no one bothered to actually build those, but they just built weaker items instead.
This leads us to Patch 14.7 where Riot has given Kayn another buff. It is a small buff and only 5% more bonus AD ratio on his Q.
There are a few reasons why this small buff exists. It's a placebo buff that will most likely not make a difference in the grand scheme of things but helps players while they are moving away from building Profane Hydra. Riot also acknowledges with this that Kayn doesn't need any big buffs and therefore can tell that Kayn players just keep building the wrong items.
In conclusion: Please Kayn players, buy Youmuus Ghostblade or Eclipse. They are much better, especially after the changes.
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