Let us have a moment of silence for Real Darius: RIP 2012-2015

First off, I'd like to start this topic by acknowledging that yes, I am a Darius player and yes, I do like the champ. If these things don't apply to you that is fine but please don't flame or casually dismiss everything said here just because you don't like the champion. Second, I'd also like to say that new Darius is neither OP nor trash and I am not arguing for balance reasons here! Personally I think his new kit is ok when looked at in a vacuum, maybe only needing some small number tweaks.

On to the body of the complaint: New Darius has completely reversed identities in terms of power spikes and team role.

Old Darius was a lane bully with immense early game lane power and snowballing potential who relied on getting a kill or farm advantage in order to stay relevant into mid and mid-late phases of the game, falling off pretty hard as everyone else got the items and levels to catch up with him. He was like a less extremely early-oriented Pantheon in that regard, and was mainly an asset to his team through his potential to shut down his opponent and gank other lanes or counter-jungle while he was strong. Teamfighting was one of his weaknesses since he lacked the inherent tankiness and utility of a true front-liner and the mobility and dive potential of a bruiser such as Vi, and for the most part he was relegated to peeling the divers off his carries and / or zoning them out.

New Darius takes the above identity and switches it around completely. He is weak early but can wreck a team in later stages, assuming he or his team can get his targets within his effective range. To clarify, Darius now has an extremely weak early game which is caused by 2 changes:

1. Base damages nerfed into oblivion, and scalings haven't improved enough to make up for it until well into the late game. You could argue that the new AD bonus on passive makes up for that, but honestly 5 stacking was hard, is still hard, and if you do it it tends to win the fight even with the old kit. In most situations, if Darius got 5 stacks on you you either misplayed, mispositioned, or miscalculated your damage, but champions aren't supposed to be balanced around enemies committing errors.

2. Q is very, very slow. Q was Darius' bread and butter, his trading and zoning tool both in lane and out. Not only was the damage nerfed heavily but the windup time now gives the opponent a huge window to escape, this is especially noticeable against mobile matchups such as Riven, who Darius used to counter in lane and who now destroys him effortlessly while still having a better late game. (Damage comparison: at rank 5, old Q instantly did 235 + 70% Bonus AD handle damage, and plus 50% for blade, so 352.5 + 105% Bonus AD at the blade. By comparison new Q does 100 + 1.4 Total AD with a .75s windup. It's so bad they had to give him a big heal on his Q to even make it worth casting, and the disparity is even bigger at earlier ranks of the ability.

There are other factors that make him weaker earlier such as the loss of MS on his passive, no longer having magic damage in his mix, loss of base AS and AS scaling, and the removal of the AS debuff on W, but the above changes are the most responsible for Darius' new unwieldy early game. Now Darius has to start with sustain and hope to farm up enough to buy some items and become relevant in teamfights later in the game. My issue is that many other champs do this better and this flies in the face of everything that seeing a Darius on your loading screen used to represent.

I know his teamfights are much better now with the ridiculous Bloodlust passive proc, but did we need this so badly that we had to destroy one of the most classic lane bullies of the game?? Multi dunking and reveling in the anguished cries of your mutilated foes after teamfights used to be a reward for playing your champion well and dominating your lane opponent, now it's just something that comes inevitably as you cower under turrets and farm up minions. And since he still suffers from horrendous problems with kiting, his late game buffs are much less outstanding than they seem since most of the time he will be kited to death anyway, and as a result he has become much more team-dependent as well.

Also, let's be real here: there were already plenty of choices for top laners who started weak early and farmed up to become monsters, such as Irelia, Jax, Nasus, and even Vladimir. The list goes on, and every one of those champions is still better than Darius late-game and now many of them either beat him early or have far fewer problems laning against him now. I understand Darius himself is much better in the late now than he used to be, but his laning and early game in general are so horrible that he just feels, well... neutered.

In the end I guess I'm just not sure why Riot decided that a classic early game bully had to be changed into yet another asshole who buys flask + 3 and spends 20 minutes farming to become relevant. Did LoL really need another wannabe Nasus on its roster? Are we just phasing out lane bullies in general? I hope not, because LoL games will then be a boring 30 minute farm fest so that we can finally see cool things happen after that. I don't think anyone really wants that, no matter how much they may despise a particular lane bully who counters their main or whatever.

**TLDR: New Darius is ok but completely reverses the identity of Old Darius, he went from earlygame monster to bad early who has to farm up. His late is better but who ever picked Darius for late-game anyway? RIP **

--edit-- Just realized there are some buffs to Q damage and attack speed scaling for Darius on the PBE, while I think this is nice I believe my points still stand. And something I forgot to mention: Fixing the bug on his E made it much less useful for what was already a very short ranged hook. Now any riven or lee sin worth a damn will never be pulled.