By MrRipley

Sam Hartley

The Evelynn Rework - What's changed?

Tue 24th Jul 2012 - 11:11pm Category: League of Legends

Evelynn is a touchy subject in the League. Once considered incredibly OP, a year ago Riot nerfed her into the ground – removing her stun, increasing cooldowns and reducing numbers. She has since lived a half-life, being picked to force someone to dodge or as a tournament placeholder pick. Evelynn mainers have been looking into the distance, to a fabled “Stealth rework”.

Well now it’s here. Stealth has been reworked. Xin Zhao is now a man again, even without a montage, Twitch has been changed to fulfil the role of an AD carry – but how has our beloved Evelynn fared?

 

First, let’s run the comparison between old Eve and new Eve.

Old Evelynn:

- Assassin character with long-term stealth, able to sneak up on unsuspecting enemies and take them out with burst damage into sustained chase damage.

- Countered by vision wards and tower-hugging (this is what Riot wanted to eliminate).

- Could be played in a variety of ways, hybrid/AD for more sustained damage, AP for more burst damage.

- Ultimate allowed her to jump in, assassinate someone and make it out alive.

New Evelynn:

- New stealth mechanics mean enemies will see you before you are in range, putting extra emphasis on using movement speed buffs to get into range quickly or tankiness to survive the damage you take trying to get in range of enemies.

- Can now contribute to teamfights more than before with her ultimate, which is on a long cooldown (2 ½ minutes at level 1, 1 ½ minutes at level 3)

- Burst consists of Ravage and your high-cooldown ultimate, which is less useful against squishies as it does % damage based on health.

- Hybrid/AD is now a far more useful build path for her over AP, as ability ratios are equalised between AD and AP and your autoattacks do far more damage as a hybrid/AD than AP.

From my experience playing reworked Evelynn, I now feel that she has been turned into a tanky DPS with roaming capabilities, rather than the assassin she was originally envisioned to be. Time to take a look at how her abilities have changed.

The new stealth mechanic vision range is far too long. Eve will never be able to sneak up on someone in lane, as they will CC you/escape before you get in range to use any of your damage skills. The fact that her movement speed buff de-stealths her as well means that she can’t even activate it before she’ll be seen to charge into range.

Her damage is now lacklustre before she gets a decent amount of items. It wasn’t particularly high before, but she could continually use Hate Spike as she chased to take down a single enemy.

Hate Spike is now on double the cooldown, can hit multiple enemies in a line from projection instead of two targets and does less DPS than the original Hate Spike when used on a single target. Once again, this ability has been changed to fit a more AoE damage role in teamfights rather than assassinating a single target. It should also be noted that this now has a much longer range than before, giving her a fairly good ranged farming skill.

Ravage is still a good single-target nuke and now grants the strongest AS steroid in the game at 120%. It no longer shreds armour and magic resistance, does slightly less base damage and scales off AD and AP instead of AP exclusively. This is actually more useful for assassination than the old Ravage, but only when you build AD. As it gives an AS steroid, it’s wasted on AP Evelynn.

Her new ability Dark Frenzy is exceptionally good at sticking to a target when used in conjunction with Ravage, as she gains an extra base movement speed increase as she attacks an enemy (Ravage’s AS buff allows you to stack this passive faster and therefore stay in range for more attacks) and the initial %MS buff allows you to quickly close on a target.

Her ultimate is now incredibly powerful and sports a cooldown just as powerful. This ability convinces me that Riot has decided that she should be a tanky DPS. It does a high percentage (15/20/25%) of max HP magic damage, slows enemies by 30/50/70% and grants her a shield for 150/225/300 HP per champion hit (a shield for possibly 1500 health if hit on every enemy champion!).

Gone is the old ultimate, the one that allowed her to charge onto a target, kill them and use the health bonus and refresh to swiftly retreat. In with the tank-killer ultimate and a shield that allows her to tank incredibly well while preventing non-gapclosing bruisers from jumping on your carries. If you use this ability for single-target damage, it will not be off cooldown before a teamfight arises. All these changes point to a designated role as a teamfight-oriented tanky DPS.

 

I’m not informed on the inner working of Riot game developers unfortunately, so I don’t know exactly what they intended with this rework. In terms making her viable again, it has definitely succeeded once people get used to her. The stealth aspect of her is far less important than it used to be and she can no longer function as an assassin. I found that once you stopped playing her like an assassin and instead played her as a sort-of-Irelia, she felt much more useful and much more fun.

Of course this was just the initial rework and no doubt Riot has more changes and balance idea to implement – rendering this article irrelevant. For now, you old-time Evelynn players are going to have to break the habits forced on you by our assassin turned spiky shield and not rely on stealth.

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