The title is self explainatory.
If d&d is a hot doodoo item on Shyvana because of it's low stats and lackluster healing, why not go for a more burst oriented sheen item like lichbane when building AP?
I mean it doesn't have health or attack speed or any survivability, but it has the AP and ability haste (and some ms as a bonus) so surely it makes up for something.
I hate to be a doom poster, but it's time we had a real talk about why riot is so afraid of giving Shyvana a real passive.
Long story short, it's because giving free resistance stats to a character that can build AP is very dangerous, and you might say "oh but there exist AP bruisers that have high resistance" and you'd be correct! Except they don't actually get resistances (not all the time at least).
Mordekaiser is notorious for being pretty difficult to kill (at least in low elo) both from his W shield and his R stat steal + he deals huge burst damage, except he 1 has no mobility and 2 no way to deal damage from a long range.
Sylas' W was a bandaid fix to his survivability in lane while he was still being conceived as a mid lane assassin, which while yes it is now a problem with his bruiser build and high mobility, it is now somewhat balanced by his (somewhat) lacking damage and again the fact that he has no way to deal damage without being close to the enemy team.
Now where am I going with this? Shyvana is a diver, and divers are notorious for their ability to very easily dive the enemy backline and stay on top of the damage dealers, taking away a lot of the pressure from their team - now imagine if a diver went on the enemy backline, bursted them down with their abilities, and could still fight because of either their really high innate infinitely scaling (P) resistances, or innate high (W) shields and (R) health. That would lead to a lot of frustration and very obvious quick nerfs.
So, what I'm trying to say is that we won't get any ability enhancing passive, or a resistance passive, or whatever else that would allow Shyvana to do what she already does but better, as long as we are allowed to build both AD and AP (with mixed results) on Shyvana (which a lot of us are fans of, me included).
Anyway if this posts goes big or something, I'm obviously open to a friendly discussion on the topic in the comments. Cheers.
I'm gonna preface this by saying that, as much as I'd love to get into the details of every change numbers wise, I just can't do that, because I'm not a numbers person. This is instead going to be a post listing a bunch of changes that I'd like to see in my favorite champion to make her fantasy as an unkillable late game scaling dragon more real than it is now.
Passive - This might be surprising, but the passive is not getting any changes with how it functions, which means that unfortunately top lane Shyv is getting left in the mud (sorry, this hurts me as well). At first I had an idea of just making it so every passive stack gives 0.1 armor and mr, and make it so minions give you 1 stack, while a camp gives you 3 stacks, keeping jungle Shyvana the same, while also throwing lane Shyv a bone, but nfortunately any changes to stack gain from lane would just create an unhealthy dynamic, where Shyvana after every gank would just steal a portion of her laner's minions, just so that she can have more passive stacks, and I'd really hate for Shyv to be known as one of those toxic junglers that you loathe having on your team if you're a carry. I also heard of a solution where Shyvana's passive stack gain is decided by which role quest she has, which at first I was a fan of, but then I realised that it just creates 2 separate champions for riot to balance, and we know that riot would hate that. So again, no changes to how the passive itself functions, just to what it affects in other abilities.
Q - This ability is pretty much perfect for me with how it functions, except for the fact that in late game fights you're pretty much just going for the Q3 true damage chomp for your big burst damage (if you're playing an AD build of course). So I propose 2 changes that may or may not make Shyvana even more of a team fight menace. 1st change is to - after a certain passive stack threshhold - give her Q2 a slow to every enemy champion hit, either in both forms to give human Shyvana more to do in fights than just waiting for R, or only give it to dragon Shyvana if the change is just too much. This is a very simple change, which would make her late game team fights just that much more impactful. It also might be a huge overkill depending on the slow value. Now my 2nd change (which is separate from the first one just so we're clear, I think both of the changes at once would just make her too powerful) is to give her Q2 a size increase, either stacking over time with her passive like how Aurelion functions, or give her set size increases through passive stack thresholds. Is this change kinda useless by it's own? Maybe. But it does give her even more synergy with omnivamp if she hits more champions, or it gives even more area damage to her AP builds.
W - I wish this ability (and the R HP) scaled with Shyvana's passive stacks, but riot has already expressed that they don't want to give Shyvana more tankiness for her non tanky builds, so I'm not gonna go for that. Instead what I want to do, is amplify this ability's already existing qualities, which is healing for AD and damage dealing for AP, which is a really easy thing to do, surprisingly. At a certain passive stack threshhold, the W shield explodes an additional time after a 0.5 or 1 second delay. Now this does multiple things - for AD builds this gives Human Shyvana just a tiny bit more damage if she sticks to an enemy for long enough, and an additional heal for Dragon Shyvana, which obviously would realistically not be as big as the first one, because it scales with her missing health. For AP Shyvana - in both of her forms - it grants her an additional burst of damage, which is what you're playing AP Shyv for obviously. I think this could potentially stack to up to 3 explosions per W cast, but also 2 would be good enough for what the ability is supposed to be.
E - Look man I just want this ability to do anything else in AD builds than just slow down enemies, just like slap a small 20% AD ratio on it or something and buff the AP ratio. I was thinking of just giving the ability scaling true damage with her passive stacks, but really it just feels like an overkill with her already having one true damage source in the kit and just how much she can spam her E in late game. There's not much you can do to make this ability more impactful in AD builds without either giving it an AD ratio, or buffing the already existing enemy % max health ratio.
R - Increase the fury gain, that's all I want from this ability. That and maybe something cosmetic like a size increase scaling with her passive stacks, instead of ability level, or even have them both at once, i don't know.
Is this post messy? yeah a bit. I think the wording could be better, and that maybe the Q changes are unnecessary, but I'd just like if my favorite champ could feel better in late game than she already does. I'm open to criticism or discussion, even if the changes are just a for fun hypothetical.
Context: yesterday or like 2 days ago I made a post about a for fun heartsteel build for Shyvana, and got a surprising amount of replies, so here's what I've come up with, with all the suggestions from the previous posts!
So obviously the problem was: how do I fit such a useless item as heartsteel into a Shyvana build when she needs very specific stats to work (ability haste, attack speed, and of course either AD or AP for damage)? WELL!! There are 2 ways if you don't want to just stick heartsteel onto a build that already has the specific stats (like trinity + shojin).
PTA / CONQUEROR CORE:
This is probably the option with more overall burst damage, due to the 2 synergies that dusk and dawn is enabling, aka faster pta / conq procs, and faster hullbreaker 5 hit passive proc. The biggest negative of this build is that you have to build d&d, which I personally really dislike due to the build path, which is very uncomfortable for Shyvana, especially if it's your first item, because you're not gonna build hull or heartsteel first, unless you're REALLY crazy. It's also good to mention that you're not locked into building heartsteel 2nd and hull 3rd, the order for the 2 of them is interchangeable depending on the game state.
For the runes you'll of course go with pta/conq, triumph, legend hase, cut down/coup, with the green runes, with overgrowth being an obvious pick, alongside bone plating, conditioning, or shield bash, and as for the minor stat runes I'd just run attack speed, adaptive force, and scaling health, although you can switch it up for attack speed with double scaling health, or attack speed with scaling health + health (attack speed is just too useful to pass it up).
GRASP CORE:
THIS IS PURELY TOP LANE EXCLUSIVE PLEASE DO NOT TAKE GRASP IN JUNGLE!!!!
In the very rare scenario where you're actually gonna be winning lane with Shyvana, titanic hydra is gonna make your already great wave clear even better, allowing you to roam more often. Now bandlepipes might be a strange pick at first, but as one commenter mentioned, they have all the stats you'd need on Shyvana in this build, becasue they have health, both resistances, ability haste, and when you hit either your E or R, you also get attack and movement speed + the item is really cheap compared to your other items in the core. Of course both bandlepipes and heartsteel are interchangeable order wise. For runes you'll run Grasp with shield bash, either one of the runes from the middle selection, as all of them are good for different scenarions, but boneplating will probably be the best option overall, then overgrowth of course, and yellow runes, with legend haste, and triumph. anything said about the minor stat runes in the previous section also applies here.
This is my second AND LAST post about this, so really I just wanted to get everything out of the way (aside from situationals, really they are very self explainatory), so sorry about the big wall of text lol.
I've had ENOUGH of chasing meta builds, I want to play as a BIG DRAGON and heartsteel is the only item that lets me do that, so do help me theory craft to make the build feel better.
Obviously heartsteel is a bad item on Shyvana because it only affect your W and has no other useful stats, so my idea was to build titanic hydra or bloodmail OR BOTH to make use of the health you're gonna be getting and turn it into some damage. BUT OBVIOUSLY we run into the problem of "man I can't even use my big shield because I have no ability hastes THIS BUILD SUCKS" so like okay, build spirit visage, but that's not enough, even with legend haste. So I come to seek your help redditors (I'm sorry for calling you that). How do I make the build more viable, without abandoning the idea of heartsteel behind.
I've played Shyvana on and off before the rework up to about mastery 10 and my most favorite thing to do was build shojin into a full AP build for dragon E nukes, because there truly wasn't anything as satisfying as that, though I really couldn't get into playing her outside of sometimes picking her as a cheesy top laner.
Come around to the rework this year and Shyvana became my most played champion out of every other champ in the game (I got over 20 mastery levels on her alone this year) because of her gameplay and visual overhaul (I can't get enough of her gameplay fantasy). Though a thing that has bugged me ever since the rework released was that her AP builds became almost obsolete. Don't get me wrong, I love playing as the big tanky frontline dragon, but I wish to be able to have my fireballs do damage again.
I've tried multiple builds and rune setups (like building shojin/d&d/rocket belt first into rift maker, with either conqueror or pta when on jungle, or grasp when I'm on top lane) with very mixed results, and I've been wondering if there was one build that actually makes AP shyvana work, if there's anything that will make my abilities do damage again, outside of just building riftmaker at the end of a standard bruiser build.
I'd love to read up on different build and rune combinations to make AP Shyvana work either on top lane (though that's very unlikely) or jungle.
Ps. I don't use reddit much anymore so I might not respond fast, but I figured this might be the best place/community to ask about this.
