The Ryze rework seems hard or near impossible to balance
I'm solely looking at his ultimate right now. Ryze's new ultimate, as I see it, will be near impossible to balance. Here's why.
Here's the general scenario. We get to mid/late game and let's say Ryze's team goes to siege top turret (either inner or inhib). As always, you prep the waves before beginning your siege top. So let's say you're grouped as a 5 man, sieging the enemy top turret, and the enemy team is also grouped as a 5 man under top tower. You don't have to go for any risky plays, you're planning on waiting for the mid wave to hit the enemy turret. Standard stuff so far. As soon as that wave hits turret, Ryze ults, and your entire team is instantly on mid lane turret, while the enemy team is sitting top lane. If this is inner turret, you get an inner and maybe some damage on inhibitor turret. If this is inhibitor turret, you probably get inhibitor turret plus inhibitor.
"But I can send my top laner with teleport to go clear the waves, so the minions won't auto push to my turret."
Okay, sure. Let's send both of the top laners to split push. Looking at the range on Ryze ultimate, the only restriction is it would have to be one lane over. In other words, you can't be pushing top and bot, but mid and either top or bot is fine. So now I have my two top laners split pushing against each other. As soon as my top laner gets waves to the enemy turret, I can do the same thing. I can press R, and we probably get a pick on the enemy top laner on top of the turrets.
"But what if my top laner is a superior split pusher, and the minions waves never come close to my towers?"
It's the same situation as long as the two lanes being pushed are adjacent to each other. Ryze ults the team over to the enemy top laner and gets free pick off of it. Now, you can make pretty much any play you want since the top laner is dead for 30-40+ seconds. There isn't a top laner in the game I can think of that isn't susceptible to a 4 man teleport gank behind them.
The rotational advantage that this Ryze ultimate offers to a team has little to no counter play. "But you can't know that it will be overpowered yet. If it is, you can just nerf the ability." My response to this is, "How?" How do you nerf this ability? The way I see it, Ryze is either underwhelming or overpowered. The ability either remains overpowered, or it is nerfed to the point that it has no significant use. I don't see how you would nerf this ability to be an in between, but maybe it's possible. Honestly, I think giving Ryze this ability for an ultimate is just a mistake.