Needlessly complex Ryze rework is needlessly complex
Riot, you've mistaken "complexity" for "depth" again. I know you like to have "a bunch of levers to tweak" when it comes to champion balance, but that also creates that many more areas for things to go horribly wrong, and that much more information to sort to to figure out what even needs to be fixed.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Adding more features is the wrong way to go about balancing things AND making them more interesting. Making Ryze's passive require stacks, grant shields, and reduce cooldowns is just going to make his laning phase more confusing and it won't actively make him more interesting to play. Granting Ryze 30% free CDR is ludicrous, because shockingly enough, that limits gold efficiency in build options because a lot of what Ryze might want has CDR stapled to it. A bunch of limited single bounces and even more limited stacking MR Shred doesn't make for an interesting ability. And most importantly, none of the changes are going to fix any of the problems people have with Ryze. He's still going to be the tanky, spellvamping spam mage with strong targeted CC and MR shredding making him strong against tanks and squishy targets alike. Only now occassionally he'll be able to pretend he's in Urf where he can chain-snare you for six seconds while you're wondering where all of your MR went and why Ryze is healing faster than the ADCs shredding minion waves.
Riot, please, whoever on your team is always demanding more complex abilities needs a time out. They're hurting your game by making it impenetrable to new players and even harder to balance than it already is. Just...watch this. Extra Credits used to talk about League a lot, holding it up as a strong example of not only Free to Play done right, but game with a solid design philosophy behind it. I don't think I've heard them mention you guys more than once in the past two years. Something is going wrong and you need to fix it before it's too late.
