I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but since the beginning of league of legends, seven years ago, Kennen’s kit hasn’t changed once. Furthermore, he has almost the same animations, and design. Out of the 48 champions that came before him(Kennen was the 49th to be put in the game) 30 have gotten reworked, to varying degrees. Some have gotten reworked multiple times cough Ryze cough, yet Kennen is almost the exact same that he was day 1.
Now while this may be a testament to good champion design, and overall meta versatility, it seems like Kennen is just a bit outdated. At the time of release, Kennen was an amazing pick, primarily because of the aoe stun the came from his E+R combo. While in today’s roster that’s just run of the mill, at time of release, he was one of only five champions in the game with this capability. That means only 8% of the champions had an aoe stun. That was a big deal back then, while it is less of one now.
The true power of Kennen at the time of release was the fact that, aside from Flash, there were only 11 abilities that could be used as escapes from his E. Today, however, there are 73 abilities that can be used as escapes. This is without including things like Thresh’s lantern, or items like protobelt. It’s not that Kennen is bad now necessarily, but rather that Kennen doesn’t have the appeal he once had.
To rectify this, a friend and I came up with a small rework to make Kennen appealing as a champion once more. Since while using your E, Q becomes unavailable; the idea is that, similar to Rek’sai’s burrow changing abilities across her other keys, Kennen could have his Q replaced with a sort of dash ability. When activated, it would cause Kennen to dash, in the form of an untargetable lightning bolt, to any selected unit marked by his passive. The ability wouldn’t do a large amount of damage, but would help him stick to champions with escapes, as long as he’s already marked them. This would especially help counter champions like Hecarim, whose so op in this new meta. The way to balance it out would be to give it a ten second cool down, so it couldn’t be spammed to dash between units so easily, keeping it from becoming like Yasuo’s E.
Please upvote this if you think it should be seen, I’m considering trying to get Riot to pay attention to it.
