What happened to cleanse?
I think it deserves a minor buff. Maybe movespeed buff like heal?
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What happened to cleanse?
Riot nerffed it before season 1, and it's never been that useful since.
The biggest issue with Cleanse is it doesn't really do what it advertises. There are plenty of CC effects cleanse can't remove, and there are many more it just has no way to deal with at all.
Suppression, knock-ups, knock-backs, and pulls happen regardless of cleanse being taken. So do slowing fields for that matter - allowing the CC removal summoner to be bypassed completely by the likes of 
, along with 
.
Well, you can remove the 0.5 second silence from Blitz, but you get the idea.
There's also champions like 
that litterally have no CC at all, and many more that have negligible CC effects they aren't that reliant on to kill their opponents. So you've got cleanse being useless in those situations to contend with as well.
I should also note Cleanse only removes certain types of CC debuffs, it doesn't remove effects like space aids, children of the grave, or bleeding from 
, which is an improtant distinction to make between 
which does remove pretty much every debuff.
Ultimately you can face entire team compositions where Cleanse does basically nothing.
Also - summoner spells differ from champion abilities in a very key area: You can cast any summoner spell (that isn't tied to mobility) while feared, stunned, charmed, pulled, knocked airborne, knocked backwards, slowed, blinded, exhausted, rooted, polymorphed, and so on.
Most noteworthy are these 2 concerning Cleanse's plight:
Barrier and Heal are essentially an improved Cleanse because you can actually have them do things against CC cleanse can't deal with and against champions without any CC at all. You can also cast Barrier prior to getting hit with CC, where Cleanse requires getting pegged by something nasty to even do things.
Cleanse being ready to cast without any CC being active also cuts into cleanse being kind of shit as well, as there's a significant punishment if you're trying to get that 
ult duration down to 0.1 seconds and you fire to soon.
That gives me an idea for a Cleanse buff though: it should only be available to cast while effects you can actually remove with Cleanse are on your champion. At least that way it wouldn't seem like the game mechanics are giving you a massive middle-finger when you miss ever so slightly. It's not like you force Exhaust, Ignite, or Smite on cooldown if you don't line up your cross-hairs exactly.
That would also make Cleanse more reliable at negating the CC it can effect, as you wouldn't need LCS reflexes to get it to negate close to 100% of CC durations.