Kennen finally made my Top 3 list tonight after a pretty solid game that was surrendered at 25 minutes. I’m glad to see him on the list at long last and hoping he’ll continue to climb (honestly, I’d love to push TF off there – I rarely play him any more).

My favorite part of having Kennen on the list is that I can finally do some serious stat-tracking for him. There are still a lot of people who think he isn’t viable and I still strongly disagree. Take a look at the numbers. The win-loss ratio looks decent enough, but I’m particularly proud of the KDA. If 546-172-442 shows one thing to me its that conservative play mixed with the right amount of risk can yield excellent results. With a strong early game, Kennen can easily carry.

Since Kennen’s release, a large portion of the community has been clamoring for buffs. Most of the complaints center around his AP ratios, which people think are too low. Personally, I think he’s fine. As stated in previous posts, I continue to do quite well with Kennen because of his early game strength. He definitely doesn’t scale as well as some heroes, but he’s one of the best early game champions, giving you the power to get ahead and stay there.

Most recently, a forum poster asked why no Kennen buffs had made the new Test Realm patch. I was glad to see Riot respond this time – it’s been fairly quiet regarding the midget ninja so far. Here’s what Geeves had to say:

I ended up buffing his AP ratios as a result of Test Realm feedback in the last patch cycle, and I think it worked out pretty well. I have seen quite a few Kennens internally do pretty monstrous in games, and I have seen some people fail with him.

I think he currently may suffer from Master Yi/Evelynn syndrome where they are very reliant on team comp to pull off their power moves (Lightning Rush/Electrical Surge/ult is a devastating combo but he puts himself at risk to do it). I’m keeping an eye on his performance and I’m pretty satisfied with how he looks currently, but if this changes I’ll make some survivability/scaling tweaks pretty quickly.

It makes me more than a little sad to see him compare Kennen to Yi/Evelynn. Really any character that isn’t a true initiator is going to rely on team comp for success. Certainly Yi and Evelynn are among that number, but there are plenty more.

I love Kennen, I really do, but in my winlust I may have overplayed him. It was an admittedly excellent run. I won eleven games in a row and seeing that little ninja’s glowing eyes next to a full list of green “Victory” snapshots was pretty fantastic. The thing I love most about LoL isn’t finding one champ to suit me, though, it’s the variety in the champion list, so I figure it’s time I branch out once more.

It’s been a bit of a rough go so far. I’ve played as Trist, Taric, Mundo, Ashe, Alistar, Shen, Amumu, Shaco, and Corki and only won about half of those I’ve played. Part of the problem has been comp. I was so focused on playing toons I hadn’t touched in a while that I let team comp go out the window. In one 5-man last night we didn’t have any AOE mage love. None. There’s not a doubt in my mind that we would have won had I played Kennen or Annie or Fiddle but instead we were handed a pretty tough loss to a team we outskilled.

On a high note, I’ve finally unlocked every toon in the game except Eve (who I will never unlock and never play, but that’s another post entirely). I was sitting on 7400 IP after my Kennen purchase and subsequent winning spree, and I still had Tryndamere, Cho’Gath, Kayle, and Janna to purchase.

Things are looking good for a couple games this evening, so hopefully I can rectify my losing situation. A buddy is looking to pick up Fiddlesticks so it would be great to support him with Malphite or Alistar. Of course I’ve never played Janna so I might give her a shot as well.

I can’t believe how many people think Kennen is underpowered. I just don’t understand. I’ve been playing him almost exclusively since the patch and I’ve been a dominant force in every single game. I could understand if I was playing at a fairly low ELO and noobstomping, but I know my stats aren’t so bad. Honestly, I’m just a few percentage points away from a high-ELO play if recent posts are to be believed.

Here’s a look at my last ten games as Kennen, all victories (yes, I finally pulled a nice winning streak). Several of them I did run with a premade, but for most it was either partial premade or solo queue.

Victory: 13-0-2
Victory: 5-0-2
Victory: 3-0-6
Victory: 13-2-6
Victory: 9-1-13
Victory: 10-3-10
Victory: 4-1-5
Victory: 10-0-4
Victory: 9-0-3
Victory: 13-2-3

Total numbers are 89-9-54. I’m averaging almost 9 kills a game on Kennen with less than one death per game. I’m sorry, I just don’t see how anyone could think he’s UP. I can’t wait to have this little ninja on my top 3 list.

I decided to stay up last night and grab a few solo queues on TT to see how I would fare with Kennen. The first game went pretty well. I was holding my own, not necessarily dominating (they had a Shen/Poppy/Warwick so it was tough to burst a target down) but I wasn’t dying and I was picking up the occasional kill. Our own Shen wasn’t using his ult early enough, though, and we ended up losing a long game after some intense teamfights. Overall it was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately that kind of game isn’t the norm for Treeline. Most games I see are landslides in either direction, even if they take 30-40 minutes to finish. It’s a problem I think will be hard to balance if only because 3v3 is much less forgiving to players prone to making mistakes. In the next game my opponents weren’t nearly careful enough with me early game. Only one had cleanse and the others were short on CC.

You can see the results in the screenshot I posted. Take a look at Fiddle’s farm compared to my own. He was so far behind by the time I had 4 kills that there was just no coming back.