@ Riot, can you all please took another swing at Gragas?

Hey yall. I've been playing since late season 1. For years, Gragas was my absolute favorite champion.

First of all, a little Gragas history. He was always a strong champion, who saw occasional picks in competitive play on teams that valued his strong laning, safety, and team fight utility. But he was never pick or ban in either solo queue or competitive until S4, and always had a low pick rate and sub 50% win rate in the former.

In S4, Riot decided they wanted to encourage Gragas players to use body slam aggressive, instead of just standing back and throwing barrels and then body slamming to safety (a worthy goal). So decided to remove the damage splitting--an unbelievably bad balance decision that killed AP gragas.

In case someone doesn't know: body slam always had extremely high base damage, but it split its damage evenly between all targets hit (so 50% to each if you hit two targets). If you managed to land it on an isolated target, it was devastating, but it did extremely low damage if the target wasn't isolated. This was a fair and fun mechanic, with plenty of play and counterplay on both sides.

So Riot straight up removed this without touching the base damage. This massively increased Gragas's wave clear and team fight damage, and reduced his counterplay, turning him into an insanely overtuned monster that sucked to fight.

Instead of simply reverting the buff, Riot released a rushed and awkward rework that turned him into a bruiser.

The main offender on his new kit is his W. It's one of the most awkward abilities to use in the game. After channeling* for 1 second. you gain 2.5 seconds of damage reduction. The channel time means it cannot be used reactively to avoid damage you know is coming. The incredibly short duration means that any smart player can simply hold off on using their big damage abilities for 2.5 seconds, then dump everything on you as soon as it ends.

It's also a damage ability that is applied via auto attack. It's incredibly easy to avoid, due to how obviously it is broadcasted. "Oh, Gragas is drinking his beer, that can literally only mean one thing: that he is about to try to body slam into me. I guess I should back up, or stand behind my minions." Of course, you have to use it before going in, otherwise you are going to be right on top of the enemy champion helplessly channeling for a full second.

If you use the ability whenever it is off cooldown, you will spend 25% of the fight channeling. If you have 40% cdr, you will spend 33% of the fight channeling. If you don't use it whenever it is off cooldown, you are sacrificing a huge percentage of your sustained DPS and your innate tankiness. In my honest opinion, this is the most mind-boggling frustrating ability to use in the game. No matter what you do, you are screwing yourself over.

Riot: please, as a long term fan of this game, and a long term fan of Gragas, I'm begging you to go back to the design table with him. You spent, what, two months working on the rework? And you never consulted his fans, as you have in subsequent reworks.

When you screwed up with Skarner and Cassio, you went to the players, you talked to them, and you tried to make it right. Well, Gragas is pretty screwed up now too. Please, help out the fat man, and not just with number tweaks. His W is in serious, serious need of a full rework.

*NOTE: yes, I know it's not technically a channel. You can still move around. But you can't auto attack or cast spells, and "channel" is probably the best word to describe it.