Some of the "Minor" reworks of class updates seem rather random and unnecessary.

So everytime there is a class rework, there are 4 major reworks while the rest of the class gets minor reworks. While the 4 major reworks are well-thought out and have a lot of effort put into them to fix the inherent problems of the champions that they are targeting, the minor reworks tend to not change a lot at all or just create even more problems.

For example, my favourite major rework of all time was . It solidified his gameplay identity without killing what made Darius Darius. In fact, he's much more fun and intriguing than he used to be and all of the problems old Darius had, and there were a lot of them, have been mostly fixed. He surely started out pretty strong but that was just a numbers issue which Riot was able to deal with pretty fast and every major rework requires some balancing to put them in line. I think the same thing will happen with , once his numbers are fixed I think he will be a flat out better version than old Rengar in pretty much every aspect.

Then there are the minor reworks. Because they get much less attention than the major reworks and have much less effort put into them, they sometimes just end up being completely unnecessary.

Take for example. He was a champion that wasn't played that often but those who did play him were mostly die-hard mains. He had a core identity of being an illusive early game invader and ganker with a lot of tactical depth while being a splitpusher late-game. His problems were that his early ganking was lacking counterplay since pinks would only be bought at the end of the early game which made it practically impossible to get vision against him at that stage and that playing against him was generally just very frustrating and toxic.

Now, what a rework would have been supposed to do at this point is keeping his identity of an illusive early game pressure champion and assassin while fixing his inherent problems.

And while it tried to reach that, it was not thought out well enough with a lack of effort. For example, I overheard during a dev stream that the Shaco rework mainly aimed at solidifying his role as a late game split pusher that would build a mix of crit and CDR while at the same time not trying to kill AP Shaco.

So first of all they simply gave up on trying to keep his role as an early game pressure assassin with lots of tricks up his sleeve to make him a scaling late game champion. Yet they even failed at that. Even though he appearantly was intended to build crit, his new backstab mechanic actually encourages you to do the opposite and makes crit builds the least attractive build on him. While the old Shaco would get an enhanced crit on his Q that would be further enhanced by his old backstab, new Shaco's Q can't crit unless it backstabs and the backstab crit itself is weaker than a regular crit, while not stacking with regular crits on top of that. There even was a mechanic that would weaken regular crits if you would backstab, so that a crit build would encourage you to facestab instead - a huge failure. There were also a lot of other random changes to his AP ratioss and the addition of a triangle of boxes to his dying clone from which I don't know to this very day what they're even there for - it seems like a change that was not implemented to deal with one of the specific problems of Shaco's kit and solidifying his identity but rather because whoever worked on it thought it would be cool.

So instead of fixing his problems and solidifying his identity, his old identity is practically dead while his new identity is a random AP jungle shaco build, that is as frustrating as old Shaco while sitting at a 53% winrate.

The worst part is that we won't see him fixed for a very long time. Riot's champion rework team won't be revisiting his kit until a few months or likely years while the balance team won't do anything about it since it's simply not their job to define Shaco's identity and make big changes. Instead they already have to ensure that everything is balanced and nothing gets out of hand.

There were a lot of other changes I won't detail here, for example ultimate change that basically only made him much more inconsistent and giving him something that he never needed in the first place, or the changes to back then which partially caused the whole penetration build fiasco.

I'm not saying all of them are bad. changes during the mage update were fantastic but in general most of the minor reworks have a more negative than positive impact on the game.

I find this especially frustrating because Riot has shown us that if they put a lot of effort and thought into a champion rework they will ensure that it will be awesome. So it saddens me to see that they don't apply that to every champion but just to a very few.

If you're not planning on fully comitting to making a champion rework during a class update, it's honestly better to just wait for the VGU and not touch them until then at all.