http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2010/234/6/0/League_of_Legends___Veigar_by_Anarki3000.jpg

I know that Veigar will be getting some sort of "compensation" for DFG's removal, but after reading the patch notes and watching the patch rundown, I'm still a little unclear on what exactly Riot has planned.

If this is about getting rid of 100-0, where does that leave Veigar?

Morello does not seem fond of the idea of single-target burst Champions. Indeed, arguably the biggest issue with DFG was that it turned a lot of mages into single-target bursters.

Veigar, however, has always had single-target burst as a core part of his kit. Indeed, his most famous mechanic is the way his ult scales on the target's AP, which I interpret as an incentive to help the little fuzzball get revenge on the enemy mid who smacked him around in lane, if they get out of position in teamfights and especially if they went glass cannon.

So what exactly is Riot planning to do with Veigar? I'm getting the feeling that they might be planning to completely trash him and replace him with a new Champion with the same name, a maneuver sometimes known as Trundle'ing. This would indeed make me very sad.

What does Riot think of Veigar overall?

My biggest concern is that Morello sees Veigar as a "smash keyboard, get kill" non-interactive Champion. I think that's unfair. I've played a lot of Veigar games, and trust me, if Veigar was simply about pushing four buttons to delete a target of your choice, I'd be a lot higher ranked than I am. Especially with all the mobile bruisers in the current League ecosystem, a Veigar who just dives straight into fights and goes for a one-shot is probably going to get CC-locked and killed by the enemy frontline more often than not. Even if a kamikaze Veigar gets a kill like that, he'll probably just end up trading himself for the target, which is a fairly mediocre deal.

As I see it, the main challenge to playing Veigar is managing one's distance and positioning. You can punish people for getting out of position, but you need to make sure you time it right. Especially where the enemy team doesn't really have a good squishy target, or where their squishies are doing a good job of keeping out of your line of fire, you also need to make judgment calls about when to go for the mega-burst and when to save your stun for the teamfight itself. And, of course, there's the difficulty of surviving lanephase.

Some say that Veigar never needed DFG. I have to disagree. Not only did it provide a way for him to turn the tables in the lanephase if he's managed to farm despite his very weak laning, but it also allowed him to (e.g.) start splitting his nukes later on.

This might not be so bad, but…

In theory, I like the idea of removing DFG. I'm getting tired of rushing it every match. To be honest, and this will sound ridiculous, I also kind of hate having to hit that many buttons at once, given that LoL will cancel inputs if too many are stacked or the ranges are wrong. ("Wait, why didn't she—oh. DFG didn't go off.") It's not a particularly exciting item for him.

But I'd like to hear a little more from Riot about how they're planning to change Veigar. I'm concerned that they won't be replacing DFG so much as completely redoing Veigar. As someone who's quite fond of Veigar, and doesn't think he deserves to be branded as a "bad old-style Champion", I'm somewhat wary. I'd certainly feel better if I at least knew that Coronach or some Veigar mainers were being consulted on the rework.