It's Time to Buff Some Summoner's Spells
For awhile now, 
and 
have been on the bottom of the totem pole. It's time they received some slight buffs and changes to bring them more in line with the "meta" spells such as 
and 
.
Let's start with . 115 - 455 damage shielded for 2 seconds. To compare, Heal restores 90 - 345 health to you and another teammate and also grants a short movement speed boost. Heal is great for not only saving yourself, but also a teammate. The extra movement speed can also help you escape a gank or pick up a kill. Barrier still has its uses, but seems to fall short of the mark today. Numbers wise, it's only slightly better than Heal for a single target (Remember, Heal affects two champions) and is a shield that disappears rather than actual health. This means it does virtually nothing against % health damage. Skills that do more damage based on how much health you're missing don't recognize Barrier's shield as "extra health" and lower the damage accordingly; you're still going to die.
To make it more thematically unique, what about turning Barrier into a much better "burst absorber"? Up the shield to 250 - 650 health and make it last 1 second. This rewards quick reactions to incoming burst (
, 
, 
, etc.) and sets the skill much farther apart from Heal. The cooldown might need to be upped as well to compensate, but that's fine as well.
The other side of buffing Barrier would simply be to increase its duration to make it less prone to reacting after damage has already been dealt. Same shield, but lasts for 4 seconds. This would also make it a direct counter to Ignite, which is quite possibly the most used Summoner Spell (after Flash).
. This one also has two simple paths to a buff:
-
Make it clear Suppression. I pretty much only bring Cleanse against
since getting caught by his cage is pretty much guaranteed death. If Cleanse removes all debuffs like it's supposed to, it becomes a much more appealing counter to champions like 
and 
. -
65% crowd control reduction for 3 seconds after using Cleanse is relatively useless, as most of the times you'd use it are in 1v1 situations. What about changing this to a much lower damage reduction? Something like 10 - 15% for 3 seconds and upping the cooldown to 270 or 300 to compensate. It's an appealing side effect, but also should be low enough that it doesn't take much away from proposed Barrier changes... But might just be enough to help survive the combos of
, 
and 
.
TL;DR Barrier and Cleanse are rarely used. Make them better at doing their intended jobs with some buffs to bring them on par with other Summoner Spells.
