Phreak on the Ahri changes
tl;dr Ahri was too safe with her new mobility, her W range nerf was to forces her to take risks to pull off a full rotation and her Q mana costs were to prevent her from being able to stick in the back and Q spam if she got ahead. Other tidbits on early laning and comparisons as well.
This is all built around the assumption that "her core weakness is that she can be ganked pre-6" I'm sorry, but that's ludicrous. She used to be easier to gank pre-6, and now it's a bit harder. Ok, so that changed a little bit. So what? Here's the thing: Ahri didn't have a real weakness. If the only weakness you can point out is, "Well, for 6 minutes you could kill her, but for the other 35 she could do whatever she wanted" that's stupid. That's not good design, that's not healthy, that's not anything good. For what it's worth, a lot of the reason LeBlanc is frustrating is because of this - She just sort of does whatever she wants all game and you just have to deal with it. You also mentioned "ruining her build diversity." It's not mentioned anywhere outside the intro. So I'm really not sure where that point's headed. And Ahri already IS squishy. She's one of the frailest champions in the game. Even Annie has an Armor/MR shield. Cassiopeia builds fairly tanky with (RoA/Seraph + Rylai's). The point of the changes is to actually EXPOSE the squishiness. Her W puts her in Equilibrium Strike range. GOOD. See, here's the thing about Ahri now. She's really mobile. She has medium-speed medium-range skillshots. She also has non-skillshots with very short range. You know what's cool about that? She can skirt around medium range poking with skillshots. She can also use her high mobility to get into close range and put herself at actual risk to land her reliable damage. Sounds like an actual weakness! She's in range of Equilibrium Strike if she wants to do more than poke. And then skillfully use her movement speed buffs and dashes (with long cooldowns after) in order to succeed. Sounds a hell of a lot better than, "Well, now it's after 6 minutes, her core weakness is gone." Also, increasing the mana cost of Q DOES affect her early game: If she can't simply spam Q on cooldown for immense sustain and easy wave clear, she's going to have less overall sustain and forced to walk into autoattack range to last hit more often. Ultimately, it's always tricky dealing with reworks, either small- or large-scale. I'd consider Ahri's total changes now a small-scale rework. Ahri now: Is much more mobile than before. She's arguably the most mobile mage in the game who can't dash over walls before level 6. Has a medium-range poke pattern as well as a short-range all-in pattern that uses multiple rotations of spells (as opposed to Fizz just REQW'ing you, Ahri Q-R-E-W-R-Q-W-R-W) supported by a lot of mobility to keep her in the fight (as opposed to something like Jax who just tanks you until he gets multiple ulti hits) Ahri no longer: * Hits you with her entire kit from out of your counter-attack range and then dashes away And of course, any time a champion "no longer" does something, everyone who's attached to it gets really scared, because a specific thing their champion used to do doesn't exist any more. But really, Ahri shouldn't be hitting you with non-skillshots while dodging everything you ever do. If she's hitting you with non-skillshots, you should be able to hit her back. Ahri's power is in getting to choose when those windows are. That's always been the core power of Ahri: Her ability to choose those windows and if she chose wrong, say "Oh crap" and burn her other two Rs backwards.
--Phreak
