Thoughts on Alistar

The problem:

While I appreciate the mana cost buffs he received, I feel that either his E or his passive need to be reworked. Alistar's Headbutt-Pulverize combo is more or less a signature of the champion now. However, even with the reduced mana costs, he is forced to stand there doing nothing in teamfights while he waits for his cooldowns to come back up due them being insanely high. He has a sick initiation combo, but he spends too much time being useless afterwards - especially if the enemy has a good disengage. Heck, you can even dash out of Alistar's Headbutt now because the dash speed got nerfed.

Because he is a melee champion with very high cooldowns, he can essentially only play one role - which is support. This is especially true now that the bonus damage from his passive against monsters was removed. You may see him top lane from time to time, but he is simply outclassed by most other top laners when it comes to laning. His subpar movement and the now incredibly high cooldown on his mediocre heal makes it too easy for him to get poked under tower and eventually out of lane. The reduced range and the reduced dash speed on Headbutt means that you can no longer cheese them with Q and W under turret like he used to because they have so much more time to react.

Also, being forced to build around CDR every game is not healthy gameplay.

Possible solutions:

I admit that reducing the cooldowns to his W and Q would make them too strong. However, I don't like the fact that I'm almost forced to build 30-40% CDR on him to make him relatively useful in fights. Let's face it, the AoE heal on his E is trash now that it only heals 33% of the amount to allies - not to mention that increased the cooldown and pretty much no one builds AP on Alistar anymore. The reduced cooldown when an enemy dies makes no sense because that forces you to push your lane. I think it'd be a better idea to remove the reduced cooldown when an enemy dies, and make it so that the cooldown is reduced by ~1.5 seconds every time you auto-attack an enemy champion. This gives Alistar a chance to get at least two autos in when he does his W-Q combo, and it wouldn't be especially OP because he's not a particularly sticky champion. This makes it so that Alistar is actually doing something instead of senselessly whacking enemies in fights while waiting for his Q to come back up, because now his heal and trample passive are actually up a bit more.

Another idea I have is to make his E an empowered auto instead, that shields him after he autos for X damage (same as the base values for his current heal) for 1.5 seconds, depending on rank, while a nearby ally receives a shield that's 33% as effective. This still makes him weak to poke because he needs to get up close and auto to get the shield, but it also gives him a relatively low CD auto-attack reset on his E. Just a small flat amount; not enough to make him an OP duelist, but enough to make it so that he's not just a wall that can be ignored when his cooldowns are not up. I personally like this idea better because having an all-in support with sustain makes no sense, as all-in lanes are supposed to be weak to poke.

Finally, in case the suggestions above are a no-go, here are two last options I can think of to 'fix' Alistar. Because Alistar players are forced to build CDR 100% of the time to be remotely useful, I think it's fair to give him some CDR per rank in his ult.

Either that, or his passive should be reworked into something like: "Bonus cooldown reduction does not affect Alistar's skill cooldowns, but will make trample do more damage based on CDR from items, runes, buffs, and masteries. Auto attacks reduce the cooldowns of Alistar's basic skills by 1 second," and lower his attack speed growth/tweak his cooldowns accordingly. This rewards Alistar players for being able to go in to land autos while being a champion that is weak to poke. During teamfights, if the enemy team is able to kite him well or if his team doesn't engage well, he will be stuck with long cooldowns.