I feel like I owe you guys an explanation. I made a passing mention of Eve the other day along with some malicious comments and I figure it’s time I come clean. The people I regularly play with know just how much I hate Eve and the reason why, and I think it’s only fair you do too.
First, a little history. I came to LoL from DotA, so I had a pretty good understanding of the game’s basic mechanics. The only thing to learn, really, was the champions. I started off with Kassadin and Master Yi, but after seeing what Twisted Fate would do to a game I saved my IP until I could buy him. He was dominant, but again, I was coming from such a similar game that it was easy for me to maximize his potential.
Then I met Twitch. It was pretty clear that he was this game’s Rikimaru, only stronger because he was ranged and had the ability to hit multiple toons and then nuke. Prior to his nerfs he stayed strong through most of the ELO brackets. Then I met Eve. She seemed strong at first – she got stealth, had good nuking potential, and seemed to break everyone but the strongest toons. Luckily, the LoL designers implemented a consumable even better than gem – Oracle’s Elixir. I bought one early when I laned against an Eve and presto, she was almost completely nullified. It wasn’t quite the same for Twitch because he’s ranged, has an AOE slow, and can still blow up an entire team.
Don’t get me wrong, Eve is great at the lower ELOs. People rarely play to counter one another so she can run around legendary as often as she pleases. That’s actually a bad thing, though, because it pigeonholes players into toons that have limited viability as the player improves and it discourages new players from playing the game because they get stomped by one toon with seemingly no recourse.
What Eve really needs is a complete remake, an overhaul that makes her fun both to play and play against. The last time anyone from Riot commented on her they said Eve was at the bottom of the priority list precisely because she does so well at low ELO. Honestly, that seems like a terrible reason to keep a toon around. Give newer players a chance to get better rather than getting stomped by a truly uninteresting toon.
