PhreakRiot

She could be. From what I can tell, SRT (Summoner's Rift Team) is pretty happy to say that flex picks are only problems when they become problems. See their buffs to Mordekaiser jungle and nerfs to Morgana jungle. I think they'd be happy with Shyvana being viable top/jg but would take issue if she became really difficult to play around due to flexibility.

As for her builds, looking at public data, Shyvana has about a 52% winrate when she completes Nashor's or Night Harvester as first item and a 52-54% winrate when finishing BotRK, Sunderer, Stridebreaker, or Trinity Force first item. Even Iceborne Gauntlet appears to be a possible strong starter.

Her picks are overwhelmingly AP (83% of games finish NT/NH first), but she still appears to be slightly more successful with AD fighter builds.

Technically the Q is 8 seconds for my choice (couldn't easily look it up when I posted) but the pattern holds.

Blitzcrank and Nautilus are not bad options in terms of combat pattern. However, they both have E as a shorter cooldown than Q, so they'd be hitting that button instead.

I think Annie has some decent target selection gameplay with her shield and arguably should micro Tibbers, but this is a really solid guess.

Q also isn't 10 seconds, but this is as close (in terms of fitting as an answer) an answer as I've seen.

Warwick has reasons to delay his E and he doesn't W at the start of combat. (My pick technically has a delay case for one of the abilities but it's weaker than Warwick's DR)

Sett absolutely does not dump his W instantly.

You can literally just look at my rookie of the year ballot

How is this garbage upvoted?

For what it’s worth I view it this way:

AD bruiser has usually been the stronger playstyle.

Despite that, AP has been substantially more popular. The most recent buffs to AP Shyvana were to get her to engage with the rest of the kit, like Q autos. I don’t think they’ve buffed the E ratio in forever. It seems like they’re still interested in AP being slightly weaker but also with more gameplay.

He is absolutely a Yuumi main.

I hit literally every button (including summoner and active) on them at the start of the fight and then just auto-attack for like 10 seconds until my second Q.

Edit: I realized I'm an idiot. I don't hit all my summoners. Flash usually isn't required.

Hahahahahahaha

Yeah.

I can totally see the idea of "I want to build my champion in multiple ways" but there are already items for that. Like... just build a Spirit Visage if all you care about is surviving magic damage. Is the complaint that mage items have AP on them?

Saying that Seraph's, Void Staff, and Deathcap do the same thing is pretty silly. They do distinct things. They just also provide a lot of damage.

A few thoughts:

1. AP items are far from the only ones that only have a single output (dumb damage). You mentioned a few, but add Phantom Dancer and Rageblade to the list. What is Trinity Force but just a way to deal more damage? There are a lot of items whose primary output is "deal damage." This isn't unique to mages and it isn't a problem.
2. I don't think "more damage" is a bad output, even when there are multiple options that do it. IMO the point of the item shop is to present you with interesting decisions when you have gold to spend. Choosing among Horizon Focus, Deathcap, Void Staff, and Cosmic Drive as the best option is an interesting choice. No one item dominates the others in all game states. To me, that's the primary use of items. I think all the comments like "what do you mean, i love that the "item rework" gave me the same items ive been building for several years" are trolling. There are clearly decisions and if you don't think they exist, then chan...

IIRC one of the gameplay team people said "If it procs Aery."

I find Gangplank’s lategame to be relatively weak. His damage through barrels is unreliable and doesn’t have the tools a Yasuo or Gwen has to fight in melee consistently.

Solo queue data suggests that more of her power is in the early game. She’s good at forcing 15- and 20-minute surrenders. She comparatively falls off versus the average bot laner from there.

It's more that buying a skin does not interfere with other systems. It's all on your side and has no gameplay impact. Buying a champion has other considerations, which makes it less of a slam-dunk.

Yeah I just realized including "I like this" is weird when I started with "Some of these are not so good." That's my bad!

As neat as these are, I wonder how usable some of them would really be:

1. Buying a champion. This often doesn't come up, but it is real: If no one on the opposing team owns the champion, it doesn't appear for bans. One could argue that the game should just leave up all bans, but I suspect this is valuable for newer players in their first games of ranked (where they are likely to run into other new players who also don't have all the champions). So you'd only be able to buy champions in the very early declare phase. This can be problematic if it takes the store a moment to process. Even if not, I'm worried adding extra overhead and integrated systems into champion select creates a more fragile experience. Yes the store works. Yes champion select works. But truly how often do you really need to buy champions during champ select?

2. Anonymous mode. VALORANT has this and it works great IMO. In general, I'm a fan of anonymous mode and being able to keep it on...

I love that you call us by our rightful name.

I watched the play back. Spica diverts from reading toward drake once he sees Thresh/Olaf kill that control ward. So his tell is only that a ward was killed and uses that to say, "Yeah, this is probably a crossmap." It's not mind-reading, but it's still a very smart play to intuit that dead ward = top dive because the rest of their run toward the turret is through fog.

Um ackshually he doesn't predict the Flash Taunt.

He Flashed because he was going to get hit by the normal taunt. He was well within range of the taunt-flash before he ever flashed away.

He did predict the taunt. You saw him run backwards early. But he was gonna get hit my the flash if Shen wanted to spend it proactively.

Edit: and if we're being nit-picky, he whiffs his first auto after the knockup. He Qs too early.