I've noticed that Renekton is a very underplayed champion in my games? (Gold 5) Can someone please explain why he is so underplayed? I remember him being picked almost every game? Can someone explain the nerf also if there was one?
Less of a nerf, more of an unnecessary shift in his power.
There was a significant change in the past that basically put a lot of his early game power away and gave Renekton more scaling, taking away his lane bullying strength and making him not fall off as hard late. Specifically, his ultimate's power.
The problem is that that was the entire point of playing Renekton in the first place. Renekton was the champion you used to dominate the hell out of the early game, sacrificing your late game for screwing the hell out of the enemy top laner's. When Riot moved a lot of Renekton's early game power into scaling well, Renekton fell out of his niche.
I always felt that he got replaced by irelia and also the fact that outside of the laning phase he is an anti carry who is primarily focused on stopping the adc but the adc meta is shifted towards very high mobility champions who can kite him very well. He only has his double dash which does cover a lot of distance if you get both of them but your range is just soo low on everyone of your spells that even that really isn't enough for him. I'm not saying his double dash is bad it's a really really good spell but he needs to hit is stun and thats an autoattack range spell and that dash ain't gonna cut it.
Falls off like a bitch.
whatever the reason is, i hope it stays this way. forever
An increase in ranged top laners combined with a weakened jungle.
A strong jungle is good for Renekton because he's hard to gank, easy to gank for and strong at diving or 1v2-ing.
Ranged top laners are harder to bully and can bully renekton when his slice is down. Gnar in particular has a jump so is very hard to go in on.
Irelia is a similarly annoying lane bully and better vs. ranged.
Like was mentioned earlier, he did have a shift in the his ult's power from early game to late game. Also, Sunfire Cape, Spirit Visage and Randuin's are not as powerful as they were earlier in Season 4.
Also, as much of a deal as been made about ranged top laners, I don't think Renekton holds a candle to Maokai in particular.
He was picked all the time before Ryze got buffed; he also got nerfed several times, too, so that didn't help.
Ranged champs basically killed Renekton, its hard to be able to dominate early game with Riot shifting his power toward late when champs like ryze exist who scale harder and can shut down his early game.
