[GAMEPLAY] Rammus bug - Q & W no longer overlap
Rammus was in very good shape in season 4 before Riot buffed him up by allowing his Q and W to overlap. Prior to this buff casting one would instantly cancel the other out. Somehow with this one buff, Rammus's win rate shot to the top.
Prior to this buff Rammus had either a short window of mobility (Q) or a short window of tankiness (W) with no over-lap. He was also very susceptible to be counter-jungled early game. In S4 I played over 400 ranked Rammus games with a win rate around 55%. On games where I was counter-jungled early my win rate was around 35-40%. Overall he felt very balanced before the above mentioned buff.
So after the buff he becomes too strong. Instead of removing the buff Riot decided to gut his Q cooldowns. Instead of being consistent at every rank (matching his W cooldowns) they made it 16/14.5/13/11.5/10. So he took a huge hit in mobility and his once synergistic relationship between Q and W was destroyed. Now at almost every jungle camp his W will come off cooldown 1-2 seconds before his Q. So do you wait 2 seconds and take extra damage so you can use your Q before W? Because of this nerf his early clear/sustain is horrid. Now he is even more counter-gankable then S4. Around this same time Rek'Sai was released....an even more mobile jungler who isn't easily counter-gankable.
So recently Riot showed him some 'love' by reducing the mana cost of his Q. Not only was that not an answer to his problems but they removed the over-lap between his Q and W (which originally started this whole mess -see 1st paragraph above) without telling us. So I guess it was unintentional or a bug? Either way this has killed him completely for me.
My win rate this season is at 40% with him and I was only counter-picking him into heavy auto-attack comps. I'm not even doing that now.
The fix is to increase his Q mana cost back, leave out the Q-W over-lap (that is supposed to be in right now - bugged), and revert his Q cooldowns to what they were in S3-4. This will make his kit feel synergistic again, he'll be fun again and with reasonable counter-play.
Btw I'm 43 years old and was a long time balance tester for EA's BFME2 patch team. Mentioning this as I'm interested in him being a fun & balanced champ.