As it turns out, I was dead wrong about the deceive bug. The skill is currently working as intended, dealing 140 percent of your base damage at rank one and scaling up. It does seem a little silly that you don’t get to a regular crit level of damage until rank four, but then again I seem to fare pretty well with Shaco so maybe I shouldn’t complain.

I do miss the days of two-shotting any caster that looked at me funny.

I’ve said plenty of times that I love Shaco. That frenetic, crazy playstyle just suits me. I’m also in love with all the control Shaco brings to the map. He is one of few characters that has a very easy time dealing with Warwick by himself in the early game.

Unfortunately Shaco is also fraught with bugs. The most current is one that shows up time and time again. Deceive isn’t granting the proper amount of bonus damage. Instead of dealing critical damage (200% of your base) + a bonus 40 percent at rank one, it’s only dealing base damage +40 percent. That sucks. A lot. It takes him from being one of the strongest early game characters to a fairly mediocre pile of excrement for the first ten minutes. His jungling potential is still there, and once you get a Madred’s you’ll hardly notice the difference, but as an avid Shaco fan I’m hoping they fix this one relatively soon. He’s so well-dressed now, how could you not want him to be a real contender again.

I’ve been a part of a popular thread on the test realm forums regarding Shaco bugs. If you haven’t played Shaco recently you might not want to start. As fun a character as he is, he’s horribly buggy right now, sometimes to the point of breaking the game.

As a for instance, I was running down a Kat the other day on TT. I had just given her a nice burst to put her at 10 percent health or less. A simple deceive and maybe a two-shiv and she was done. Nothing stood between us but a wide open lane. I press Q, click up next to her and…I go nowhere and stay visible. My deceive cooldown starts and I stare at my computer with a sad dejected look. We still haven’t nailed down why this happens but it’s happened a few times for me and others.

The big one, though, is deceive damage. When deceive allows you to port and stealth it’s not dealing proper damage. I first noticed it when I was attack creeps on Twisted Treeline. I had approximately 155 damage and was deceive critting minions for around 330 damage, almost exactly the 200 percent crit plus the 10 percent damage from the offensive mastery without the bonus 120 percent damage that should be applied by level 5 deceive.

Shurelia has confirmed an upcoming hotfix for this, likely on Monday. It was supposed to have been in today but it got pushed back because of some technical issues.