Hi! For those that don't know me, my name is Reav3 and I am the Lead Producer of Champions (Which includes the Evelynn VGU.) I know a lot of Eve mains on this subreddit want to have a more open discussion about Evelynn so I made this thread AMA. I can't promise that you will all like the answers I give but I can promise to at least give more context behind the decisions that were made (at least more context than "We like our Eve better")

Since Hybrid Evelynn seems to be the topic I see the most frequently I will give the context behind that first.

Early on in development we decided that Evelynns Thematic Fantasy matched that of an Assassin, rather then a Diver. We believe that thematic cohesion is important for a champion so we committed to the Assassin gameplay direction rather than the changing her theme to match a diver pattern (we would have probably made her more visually tanky if we went that direction.) Assassins have always been difficult to balance in LoL and we have made great strides in our understanding of how to make healthy Assassins in LoL (Part of the reason her Ult isn't 2 parts is because attaching a Assassins damage to there escape makes them much healthier similar Ekko Ult.)

Hybrid builds tend to work pretty well on fighter/bruiser type champions but can be very problematic on Assassins, which is one of the reasons we can't balance Live Evelynn as an Assassin and also why Akali tends to be more of a top lane sustained fighter than a balanced Assassin. The first problem being that the burst gunblade gives will lead to us having to nerf Evelynn's base kit until it is healthy with gunblade and then she will basically be heavily pushed towards building a gunblade first every game (like Akali.) Even if we take gunblade out of the equation the type of pattern hybrid builds lead to (stick to a target and chase them down) would likely lead us to nerfing Evelynn's burst damage at which point she would have a much harder time functioning as an Assassin. Her current kit would be much weaker as a diver/bruiser so that would leave her in a bad state that we don't think would really be great for Eve or Eve players in the long term.

While I know it feels like we don't care about Eve mains, we do care, its just that we also care about Evelynns future. We feel it will be worse if she ends up unhealthy for the game and then we have to nerf her over and over until she can't function as a Assassin anymore which is something we feel has a high chance of happening if she remained hybrid. We don't feel like that would be great for current or new eve mains in the future.

Anyways, hope that context at least helps, I'll be around to answer more questions over the next couple hours. After that I will still pop in and answer what I can later this afternoon and also over the weekend though it may be harder to answer the micro-design feedback without being in the office to talk to the designers.

Edit: Need to head out now! Thanks for all the great questions. I will try to keep answering questions over the weekend. though it may be a bit more sporadic!