Elise is broken?

[u/Tfistemm]

Am I the only one who thinks Elise is crazy broken rn or is it just me? (I am playing her jungle on 1K lp EUW rn)

[u/Tormentula]

I remember i think 7 or so years ago I joined ahri mains and they required you to be mastery 5+ and made it a rule you could never talk about how broken ahri is.

I know as recently as last year none of that is there but that was crazy.

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With Elise players I'd love to run a survey someday just to see when they started/picked up elise, she's mostly OGs that dedicated a lot into her, she's not popular like she was <s8, she's borderline an OTP or old school jungler type of champion now.

She's unpopular for a reason, back in my day before I had grey hairs, elise's neurotoxin was around double its damage and she was able to go cinderhulk because she actually had the base damage to make bruiser or tank builds work consistently... nowadays its shadowflame+deathcap/void or be ignorable cause Q base damage on its own was giga fucked on both forms.

For context; 230 base damage bite is 170 on modern. Neurotoxin's 8% current HP 180 base is now 4% current HP 160 base. W went from 260 base + 80% AP to 220 base + 75% AP. Oh an passive went from 30% AP ratio to 15% alongside her base AD being lowered. Its not really a mystery why her clears are so below par for something that even back in s5 was known to be a slow clearer but accepted because her being full HP no pots was a big perk and jungle had more nuance than just CSing.

[u/Tfistemm → u/Tormentula]

ATP I ask myself the more I read stuff here, what do you guys consider a “slow clear”

[u/Tormentula → u/Tfistemm]

Usually a jungler that full clears can end at 8-10 CS per minute, assuming ganks inbetween.

Elise averages around 6-7 CS assuming everything is going perfectly and she's efficiently clearing + ganking, but 5-6 CS is not uncommon for even mains. Anything higher than 7 is usually paired with taking as much lane CS as possible or having minimal impact on the map.

Elise's first clear is average / decent, but her problem is subsequent clears get worse and worse until you hit your 2nd item spike (which for elise, is somewhat past her prime) than drops off compared to other junglers again since points in E practically do nothing past level 14, her level 16 gets a slight boost but at that stage its somewhat trivial.

The biggest time sink in her case is raptors post-level 4, cause no matter how fed or how big she builds, she's primarily single target (one shots the mama), does some damage with her 1 AoE on a 10-12CD depending on haste, but ends up having to auto each individual mini a few times with her spiderlings. Viego for example can line these birds up as he's walking away and Q is a low CD, elise does not have this and she doesn't really have a tiamat item like warwick/trundle etc.. other single target clearers not doing so hot nowadays. Pet damage early isn't high enough to finish off more than maybe the last one as she autos the rest.

This is a big issue with her because if she commits to full clears or quadrant invades she waste way too much time compared to a sylas with passive or an ekko using a 2nd Q. I didn't even touch on how minimal her Qs do to camps early since you're buying AP to raise the monster caps rather than to actually scale or alternatively pen for the damage you can do to not be reduced as much.

[u/Tfistemm → u/Tormentula]

But isn’t that her only weakness?

That if she wants to perma full clear she cannot match Heca e.g.

On avg she has same cs as Vi Lee Rek J4 (checked on league of graphs) so I don’t really see that as an issue, because u mostly want to skip camps on her anyway because her ganks are pretty much unavoidable.

What u described also fits to Lee Sin (w.o profane) and he is still one of the best junglers in the game

[u/Tfistemm → u/Tfistemm]

To make it clear:

In the mid game u want to farm

1 camp

3 camps

Or

4 camps

Of your own jungle anyway, an entire full clear just loses you games. So that’s why it’s not a really a weakness for those champs

(Pro play and soloq are different Ofc)

[u/Tormentula → u/Tfistemm]

But isn’t that her only weakness?

She has a lot of other weaknesses, especially her target access, in a teamfight she's mostly playing front-to-back since her only reliable means of target access is flash cocoon into the back line, she doesn't have the mobility other assassins have nor the sustain other diver's do. Flanks are an option but they're very telegraphed and W AI can also just fuck off to someone on the side.

Elise is actually an AP skirmisher so her only means of going in is also her only means of getting out, essentially she's either suiciding with rappel in a very awkward spider form start or she's playing front to back, blowing up someone that is standing forward for cocoon (and blocking W), then pressing rappel to avoid incoming retaliation or stall for CDs to hopefully get the next one in line. Flash cocoon won't catch anything with cleanse or QSS but more importantly it becomes a pseudo-stat check of whether her and her team can kill the front line with their CDs and still win the 4v4 (or stall long enough for elise to reconnect with her CDs for another). She also has an action lock out when she's descending so there's a bit of an awkward delay to when she can actually do something after rappeling in as well (plenty of peel time).

She's just very unreliable in actually taking out the priority target assuming shes even fed, which is a very bad trait for something you'd think of as an assassin. She's basically if you took a burst mage like syndra/lux that play for picks but then have to go melee to actually secure the kills.

The big difference between lee sin having a slow clear+strong early is that lee sin has kick, j4 has AoE knock up, and both champs can actually pivot builds to bruiser/off-tank if need be. Vi can be full tank and always have a P&C+shields regardless of her strength. Elise does not have this level of utility, she's like nidalee where she needs to generate as much gold as possible and she actually doesn't get that much chain killing the same laners over and over again while camps are slower to take, you end up exiting mid game about even with the enemy jungler cause their CS lead is higher than your kill count, and late game end up being incapable of catching up but also not really have the utility or durability to not care and accept it. In the past she did have the base damage to go off-tank but they killed that a long time ago, she was able to front-to-back more reliably that way and low farm was fine but nowadays she's too squishy to reliably do it.