A Plat Jarvan main's analysis of the new buffs.

So now that I've actually had a chance to play with this buff, pretty much my predictions about it were absolutely spot on.

The CD buff to W is the most impactful thing. This makes top lane Jarvan far more sustainable in lane (though still not anything approaching good), especially against ranged matchups or champs with no mana who trade a lot. Being able to pop that shield to go in for that hard to get cs without having to use your Q to take it is really very useful in top lane. In the jungle, you don't notice it at all. You still pretty much have 1 W to use for each camp you clear.

The ultimate change might be thematically consistent with the champ, but in effect does nothing. Unless you are building a team comp around mid lane AD Jarvan where the rest of your team is there to heard the enemy into position for you to goomba stomp them, the fact is, Jarvan's ult is a mobility and zoning tool. It is not a damage dealing tool unless you are going 1v1 against someone, in which case AOE doesn't make a difference. As a Jungler, I am looking to flank the enemy and then use my ult to separate them, not to cluster them. As a top laner I'm pretty much 1v1 all the time anyway and then TP into a team fight or Flag and Drag over a wall for a flank, just like a jungler.

Jarvan still suffers from the exact same problems he did before. He has high mana costs and no sustain mechanic while at the same time being an underwhelming duelist because of how much of his kit is AOE and skill shot focused. Anyone with point and click anything just beats Jarvan by skill buffering him, anyone with single target spells beats him by doing more damage. Anyone without mana or with cheap mana costs beats him by outlasting him. That is basically everyone to some extent.

The problem is, and I have stated this many times; Jarvan is not rewarded in ANY capacity for building HP. All the tanks get multiplicative scaling off HP. Jarvan is the only tank I know of who doesn't. This means that as the game goes on, tanky Jarvan simply becomes less and less tanky relative to his counterparts. He has the same stats as they do from items, but he doesn't get as much out of them. That, in it's self, is no terrible thing, but he's also really bad at AD scaling because, oh yeah, he's a tank. So where do you put him?

He flat out sucks at jungling right now. Every dueling jungler beats him 1v1 and every farming jungler has a faster early clear. He's still Jarvan, so he can still do Jarvan things, but it is on the Jarvan to outplay the opponent, everytime. His sustain is laughably bad until level 3 and he doesn't scale well with any of the jungle items. They are ALL bad for him. He doesn't need AD, he needs armor penetration. He doesn't need HP, he has no HP scaling. He does like CDR and move speed, but he doesn't want AP and he's not really an auto attacker so sated is out. I still jungle with him because hey, Jarvan things can still win games and they always will, but I'm under no illusions that it's sub optimal.

And as a top laner, I really don't know why you'd pick him over malphite or nautlius except as a flavor choice for a tanky top laner. Malphite has a better ult and is a better anti carry, Nautilus has WAY more cc, is almost as mobile and is 3 times as tanky AND they are both rewarded for playing like a tank. If you want a carry top laner, well why aren't you picking Fiora, basically. She still just auto wins the late game. So what, in short, do you want your top laner to do, because I can name anyone who can do it better than Jarvan.

And this brings as to the real crux of the matter.

The mastery system.

AT LEAST you could say before, even with all the nerfs, Jarvan was still a very good swiss army knife of a champion. Depending on how the game was going, you could build him in any number of viable ways. If he got fed he could be a split pusher, if he got his shit kicked in, he could be an off-tank initiator on not much gold. He could easily slot himself into ANY team comp if you knew how to play it. But now, you force me to decide how I'm going to build him before the match even starts. If I'm going thunderlords then I need the stack that AD and if I'm going grasp then I need the HP even though I get outscaled by any tank doing the same thing as me, or even a Fucking Fiora going tank because of horseshit %hp true damage bullshit.

In this meta, you need to decide what you want Jarvan to be Rito. Is he a tank or is he an assassin. If he's an assassin, you need to drop the base damage and Cooldowns on his Q and increase the damage scaling and maybe only make it hit the first champion and increase the scaling and if he's a tank, you need to give him HP scaling so that he can keep up with other tanks.

TL;DR

Jarvan's buff did very little. He's still bad at Jungling, he's slightly better at top but still gets outscaled by tanks or fighters who have a clear and rewarding build path.