Why did Alistar need the Rework?

They nerfed his main combo to buff the rest of his kit.

It was not a buff but rather a tradeoff.

because we need to milk those

I think the patch notes said because alistar was good at everything.

So he can't have hard aoe cc on a 12 second cooldown AND have heals. So they took away the heal and gave him a conditional CC.

Idk what the aoe damage on E is suppose to be though. I tried jungling with him, it wasn't bad but not good either.

Ali was a one note champ that basically didn't do anythign outside of WQ And once you did your WQ you basically just walked around doing nothing. At the same time, his QW combo was very opressive, this is to both add more interactivity into his kit and give him more to do on top of making his ol' WQ a tad less oppressive.