Swain sucks
It's not a matter of just being different, he had a unique theme that was ruined. There was nothing wrong with a nice tanky sustain mage.
His q is fine damage, his w doesn't even make sense, his E is worse than the old w, and his ult is just bad...its just infinitely worse than his old R.
I wonder if riot doesn't seem to understand the most logical way to ensure a quality product is to develop it with the playerbase, instead of working with swain players to make a rework they did it all alone and created this abomination.
It's not just damage, it's that the theme of swain what made him special unique and interesting were thrown out for this random hodgepodge of a mage.