Is this what balance has come to? Catering to streamers?

And surprisingly it's not Hashinshin, this time.

Phoenix is having its numbers buffed and Tiger is having its scaling reduced to 'close the gap.' In the jungle, Phoenix is an all around inferior pick to Tiger because of its mechanics, not because of its numbers. This change does nothing to change that.

It does, however, help one thing: Udyr top. Which is a borderline troll pick and basically only played by Trick2g; not something that should be balanced around.

Why is Phoenix bad in the jungle?

Udyr has trouble sticking to a solid 70% of the roster for more than a couple of seconds, due to the amount of mobility, disengages, and CC. Phoenix's damage is only competitive if Udyr can maintain 100% uptime on his target. There exists no champion that Udyr can maintain 100% uptime on and kill with Phoenix, where he wouldn't have been able to with Tiger.

Udyr's early game dueling potential is crippled against most meta jungle champions with Phoenix. If it takes 3 seconds for your opponent to kill you, you don't have time for Phoenix's sustained damage to give you the lead.

Udyr's early game kill potential is heavily tied up in Tiger's double tap mechanic. He only wins a number of duels with meta champions by opening with a double tapped Q, and loses all kill potential on many mid and bottom lanes without being able to Flash + Q + E + Q.

Udyr's split pushing is also gimped by going Phoenix, because you lose out on Tiger's attack speed bonus on activation and you're likely building attack speed or tank, instead of AD. Phoenix does nothing to help you take turrets.

The only thing Phoenix does better is pushing the wave, but Tiamat fixes that for Tiger and is Udyr's highest win rate first item for a reason.

tl;dr Phoenix is just all around bad because its designed around sticking to your opponent and providing sustained damage, in a meta that revolves around mobility and high burst damage. Changing its numbers doesn't fix any of these problems, and the Tiger change ends up being a flat nerf to Udyr overall.

p.s. though the change to no longer have to put points into Phoenix at level 16+ is cool, even if it is relatively useless because Udyr has already fallen into irrelevance if the game goes on long enough for him to reach level 16.