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Tuesday, March 27, 2012

AD Kennen?

I played a couple of games yesterday where I first picked Kennen and then my team went crazy and refused to take anyone capable of going AD bot. AD Kennen had been used at IEM Kiev so I knew it was feasible and I'd wanted to give it a try. So two games in a row I was AD Kennen and we got blown out both games, but I don't think it was because I was AD Kennen. Both games the idiots who refused to pick a ranged carry fed the other team. One of the games Ryze was 11/0 and we lost our top inhibitor before we'd lost anything bot. But it did give me a chance to get a feel for it and it felt quite reasonable.

I look at his abilities and I see a lot of similarities with Tristana. They both have one ability that scales directly with attack damage and then a bunch of abilities that provide utility and scale with AP. Tristana has a jump, Kennen has a run fast. Tristana has a dot, Kennen has a nuke. Tristana has an AE knockback. Kennen has an AE stun. Tristana eventually gets longer range, Kennen has lots of stuns. I could maybe see the argument that they should both be AD, or both be AP. But that people seem convinced that one can only be AD and the other can only be AP seems a little odd.

Here's the thing... AP Kennen is pretty strong and probably better than AD Kennen. AD Tristana is pretty strong and probably better than AP Tristana. But the comparison should be between AD Kennen and other ADs. It should be between AP Tristana and other APs. And I think that comparison actually works out reasonably for AD Kennen. Having every 5th attack do an extra 80% damage is pretty strong when you have a lot of AD items. He has a lot of stuns in order to live long enough to farm up and to be a good part of team fights.

I donno. I think I'm going to try him again at some point and see if it doesn't work out in the late game when the rest of my team isn't incompetent!

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