I caught a late night game with Tekli last night and had a blast. We rocked pretty hard, despite our team constantly pissing and moaning that we were going to lose. During that game we were up against a Kassadin and there were so many situations that made me laugh that I just had to write this post.

Here’s the situation:
Kennen: Hey, what’s that in the shadow, over by the turret.
Annie: I don’t know, but it looks ominous.
Kennen: Is that…is that a dress?
Annie: …I think it might be…
Kennen: Well I guess we should keep pushing.
-Annie and Kennen push on the turret-
Kennen: Has it moved?
Annie: Nope, still standing there.
-Turret falls, scene end-

So I’m being a little silly here, but that situation happened so often I was cracking up. We would be pushing on a turret, occasionally with just one or two people, and Kassadin would be standing just behind it, right at the edge of the fog of war, watching. That’s the real problem with Kassadin right now. He dumps all of his damage, all at once, and once it’s gone, he’s kinda screwed. Despite having a blink as his ultimate, I still see most Kassadin players take the summoner spell Flash because his ultimate deals damage so it’s kind of a waste to use it only to escape. Unfortunately, using it to deal damage means you’re right in the thick of things, which is exactly where Kassadin doesn’t need to be.

With all of the reworks for underplayed champions, I’m surprised Kassadin hasn’t received any love. His Nether Blade skill is pretty much worthless, even for AD Kassadin, which I almost never see. The rest of his skills are focused on insta-gibbing someone, but if you aren’t ahead of the curve, that becomes a big problem. It’s a design problem I think a lot of characters face, at least those that aren’t ranged. It’s the “blow everything you’ve got and hope the guy dies” idea. Granted, you have to give melee toons pretty high burst to be effective, or a way to mitigate lots of damage so they can get close to the ranged guys. If you require a guy to strand himself in the middle of the pack to deal his damage, you’ve required him to take some extra measure of escape, which means you’ve designed some crappy extra measure of escape like Flash.

When Flash is removed from the game, which you can almost guarantee is coming, I’m sure we’ll see Kassadin less and less.