Frustrations of a Veigar main
This is basically why I feel that Veigar is frustrating and borderline unplayable right now (in addition to his ~40% winrate)
Veigar has always been very dependent on landing stun in order to trade. Without stunning, his w cannot land, and he is left with only a single, relatively low damage ability, q, to trade with. Landing the stun is also crucial because it makes it so the opponent cannot retaliate for a brief period—a necessary element, because even with the w landing, Veigar’s trade are very weak compared to say, Orianna, Leblanc, Annie, Swain, Malzahar, or really almost any other midlaner. The long cooldown on his stun, and the difficulty in landing it (even experienced players aren’t going to land it directly every time), compensated for its ability to prevent counterattacks, and punished him heavily for missing it (since while it is down he can be very easily zoned/bullied). However, as it stands, the stun is now all but impossible to land in situations where you don't have a ton of pressure (i.e. your team bearing down on them forcing them to run). On the off chance that it does land, it is more due to chance or the other player making a dumb mistake rather than any skillful positioning of it on the part of the Veigar player...“let’s click somewhere around here and hope they walk into it”…and that is a frustrating and very unsatisfying way to play.
Even the q—which even before was his only truly reliable source of damage—has become unreliable and frustrating to use…it can miss, be dodged, or be blocked by creeps, and so forth, whereas previously if I clicked q on the enemy I knew it was going to connect—it was hard enough landing the rest of the combo, I don’t want have to worry about landing my q as well.
These things were supposed to be somewhat mitigated by Veigar being able to q-farm better with the double-hit mechanic, but given how incredibly easy it is to zone Veigar now due to changes mentioned above, it is unlikely that he will be able to get much q farm at all, let alone have the lane control required to micromanage the creep health in order to frequently last hit two creeps at once with it. The range bonus on the q very minimally compensates for this (he will still get zoned), and if he wants to all-in he still needs to be just as close as the old q range in order to cast his ultimate anyways, so it does him no good there.
How should he be changed then?
Honestly, I felt that he was in a good place without being changed at all. He certainly had glaring weaknesses, but I felt like the times I got punished it was actually because of something I did wrong (missing the stun, getting too close while the stun was on cooldown, etc.). The DFG removal actually felt like it put him more into the role that he should have been in to begin with, in that it made me focus on actually getting q farm rather than needing to save all the mana I had in order to be able to kill my opponent. I don’t understand why he needed more “unreliability,” given that the stun was already unreliable and the w was entirely dependent on the stun. I think instead of the changes that have been put in, a range reduction on the stun would have been more appropriate, with some sort of buff to compensate (increased w area of effect?).
Having any delay on the stun, even a small one, just makes him terribly frustrating to play...and if for some reason the delay is going to remain a thing, he is going to need some serious buffs in other respects if he is going to be able to have any laning presence whatsoever. One suggestion I saw that seemed reasonable was to give him amplified damage to anything inside the stun, so it isn’t a necessity to actually hit them on the edge. Another option is making the w area of effect large enough so that they can’t dodge it while standing inside the stun (what’s the use of trapping them if they can just dodge your w and out trade you anyways?).
Tl;dr the new Veigar is weak and frustrating to play, and even when I do well it feels like it’s only because my opponents are bad and walk into my stun rather than because I made any good play.
