Thought: Ashe

There's an utterly hilarious thread on the official forums calling for Ashe buffs or quality of life changes through the medium of comical conversations between Ashe and other champions. It's worth a read, and started the analytical gears rolling.

Ashe is a fairly balanced champion, but her kit has two of the most awkward abilities in the game. Her passive and the passive effect of Hawkshot are problematic in a myriad of ways.

The problem with Ashe's passive is that it's fairly useless in both laning and team fighting. Aside from the guarantee of a level 1 crit, the need to constantly last-hit or auto-attack prevents the passive from stacking. You can try for crits between creep waves, but generally it's a null factor.

Hawkshot's passive, meanwhile, is notable only for it's mediocrity. Maxing it first sacrifices Ashe's only reliable offensive ability and poke for a small return in gold. While an additional four gold per creep is substantial (you'll have at least one rank normally anyway), missing a single creep due to having no way to respond to an aggressive lane negates almost an entire creep wave of last-hits. On the other hand, by the time you finally max Hawkshot (last) most of your farming is done, giving minimal impact. Whatever you do, Hawkshot's passive isn't worth much.

I have a simple idea that could possibly fix the awkwardness, swap the passives.

With gold generation tied to Ashe's passive she would no longer need to worry about the folly of trying to level it first or the uselessness of leveling it last. Instead, the passive would scale similarly to Nasus' passive, reaching full power at level 11. Some balancing would be necessary, but the awkwardness would be gone.

Shifting the Critical Strike effect to Hawkshot would not only work mechanically, but thematically. It's more intuitive to tie Critical Strikes to vision than gold generation. While this would create some tension between level 1 choices (you could no longer try to abuse a guaranteed crit at level 1 combined with Volley), it's a sound, simple change.

The key to these changes is that Ashe, while not picked often competitively, currently has a fairly average winrate. Changing her crit passive to work meaningfully in team fights or laning would possibly imbalance her. Instead, I'm simply suggesting a change that will only make her slightly more intuitive and understandable, without dramatically buffing her.