Got stuck with genji in ARAM recently & played him for the first time (not spending gold on the worst hero in heroes profile lol), and since I have been obsessed with playing him every time I have the option in ARAM because I am obsessed with how bad he is.
So to begin with, his E build is fine. I can’t share links but if you go to his heroes profile page his talent builds list, his talents in his 7 most popular builds are like 99% E talents and the only build more popular than straight E talents across the board is the same one but with the AA range upgrade. So that’s fine.
But what else does he have??? He has Q talents, but they don’t complement eachother. He has a talent that makes his D reset CD on his Q, and a talent that reduces the CD on his D so you’d think there’s a poke build you can go to emphasize your Q, buuut, you don’t get the CD reduction on his D unless you use it out of combat which means using your D redux trait wastes the talent that makes your D reset Q. He has a Q talent that increases the damage each cast does to a single target, but, it is all but unusable on any target with little enough health that it is dangerous to them and any target big enough to hit with it probably has enough health that it’s a tickle to them anyway.
Here’s the big tell on how bad his Q talents are; at level 19 if you take every single “Q build” talent, Genji’s Q’s are capable of killing… one minion. You can’t even kill two ranged minions! At level 19. Any ability that can’t kill two whole minions at level 19 when that’s the ability you took talents for at every chance, is simply not a threat to enemy heroes. Seriously, test this out, it’s heinously bad.
Of course, there’s a talent at level 20 that makes his Q pierce. “Surely that makes him a waveclear monster!” It does make it better at waveclear! Now it’s able to kill one minion, seriously injure a second or third and get most of the rest near half half. And it only took every Q talent all the way to level 20 to be halfway capable of killing a minion wave. Yes, I know the talent isn’t just meant to be used for clearing waves, but even as a tool against heroes it completely fails because it’s only useful against enemy heroes who are clumped up into a pile and on that same tier he has Living Weapon which has the exact same usecase but is much better.
TLDR; it’s real bad.
Sharpened Stars should be a pre-10 talent since it’s imminently important to his ability to do anything except finishers, Shingan should do % damage since it’s extraordinarily more useable against enemies with high health pools, and he needs a talent at 16 or 20 that just makes every Q & AA he hits a hero with reduce its cooldown by a small amount, AND, he needs Deflect to make him able to mount despite getting hit (he’s taking 0 damage), Agile Dismount to last for 0.5-1.0 seconds after getting dismounted, and for Perfect Defense to decrease mounting time while he’s deflecting so that weaving enhanced D’s into his combat can be a thing. Oh yeah and Dragon Claw now activates automatically when he lands from his D instead of being an activatable and is now a level 16 talent with upgrades as needed.
His W build is fine too but it only works against teams who don’t know what they’re doing. As such his W talents should be compressed onto one or two talent tiers with an alternative to them in case you don’t wanna take them so the build is there if you want it but even if you take it you still have to build something else too while you’re at it in case the enemy team of first-time players figures out what you’re doing mid-game, which they mostly already are. The only suggestion I have for it is that he needs a talent on his 16 that is neither W or E so that not going W build requires you to go E build, but that was already addressed in the suggestions to fix his Q build so
PS, I don’t care about ranked, how good Genji may or may not be at the smallest, most niche portion of the playerbase or how these suggestions would affect him there. Every hero should be useful & good in all game modes, if you disagree you have a brain disease and need professional help.