An in depth look into Shen and why his popularity has been destroyed by commitment to a mechanic you probably don’t understand.

https://lolalytics.com/lol/yasuo/build/

He is now at under 3% popularity in plat+ and under 51% winrate, which is abysmal for a champ at this popularity, and has no room for buffs. There’s only been nerfs after nerfs for Shen. Even the latest tower plating changes buff was negated by the upcoming tower gold changes.

Shen stats - League of Legends (leagueofgraphs.com)

He used to be at 15% popularity. He is a fun 1v9 carry champion that is seemingly perfect for a popular pick, combining high damage, mobility, sword macroing, global ultimate, a high skill cap and being conventionally attractive with plenty of skins,

So what happened?

• A large % is going to be lots of new flashy champions released since 2015, but that is still post Shen and other similar era champions have kept much better % played stats.
• People got too good at him, and riot had to start balancing around the best Shen players. Not a death sentence for sure, champions like lee sin survived this just fine.

BUT

Shen is too difficult for a reasonable league of legends champion because of one mechanic, SpiritBlade.

Take a look at this Shen mains post (from 5 years ago)

Petu’s Challenger Shen Guide with Detailed Matchups! (2017 Summer) : summonerschool (reddit.com)

There are 10s of different combos for every situation , I just want to say, COOL THIS IS FINE .

Whenever you try and talk about Shen and removing this mechanic, people start thinking you want to remove MULTIPLE ENTITY CONTROLLING, which is absolutely not the case. Yes it takes some work getting into, and some champions like Yorick and Zyra had them removed, but this is absolutely not the problem with Shen.

So what is the problem?

SpiritBlade

It sounds simple enough, here is a guide How to Taunt Flash and Q Flash

What it means however is a massive dps difference in using Shen’s combo intuitively - weaving autos between spells, and using this “bug” empowered Q hitbox around Shen constantly to make him do more damage. It feels like 1000s of gold worth of attack speed it’s so big the difference. You frankly cannot play Shen in a competitive game without doing it, he is balanced around it and to avoid being stat checked you have to.

You might answer, durrr just git gud, practise it. But the thing is that doing this through a game in every single situation combining with all the other combos is so hard even pro toplaners pros do not consider learning Shen to be worth it. There have been many metas were Shen has been viable and seen pro play, but only a handful of pros will bring him out.

The fix

It was actually fixed before Riot reworked Shen, where Shen’s Q was a target ability and doesn’t do absurd %maxHP damage. Shen was way more popular as people could actually access closer to his full strength without months in the practise tool.

You just make Shen like every other champion, no benefit to clicking really quickly behind his between every auto…

But I like this mechanic stop making the game too easy!

No you don’t, this mechanic is done by like 10 people in the world at a consistent level in every game. Shen would keep a high skill cap but just not an obnoxious skill gap gated by starcraft level clicking. Which leads me to…

IT ISN’T FUN

To play Shen at a level he is balanced around, you have to look at your sword and then back to you then back to your sword sword and back to you thousands of times more than a jax player look at his minimap. This isn’t about game knowledge, kill thresholds, combos or things that make most “difficult” champions have a high skill gap, it’s just entity position management that 99.9% of Shen “mains” don’t do properly anyway.

Why has Riot not changed this already

Community outcry, seriously. Mostly by Silver Shen mains who think Riot would be removing simple entity management by pressing E+Q.

Also the “not a bug it’s a feature” was talking about Shen’s ability to jump over walls with e on jungle camps, which was kept as a cool mechanic. SpiritBlade is an abomination of game design separate to this.

Ultimately if you like Shen at all, you should support this as removing it let’s riot actually buff him to be playable outside of grandmaster+ 1 tricks.