Riot as an old Varus main i believe you should look into reworking him soon.

Hayaishi2··6 votes·487 views

After lethality nerfs Varus poke playstyle disappeared from viability with the gutting you gave to his Q (which turned it into a joke ability whose only purpose is to proc blight) i believe Varus deserves a rework, kinda like Azir.

Hear me out, while he is still viable with the attack speed builds, Varus IS NOT an attack speed hero. For years the focus was on his Q, all his power budget was into his Q, then it was nerfed, and it was probably justified. The problem is you did not compensate him well enough Riot.

Your nerfed his Q damage and cooldown, added some cooldown reduction to his Q when it procs blightstacks and called it a day. Varus does not work as an attack speed marksman, he will always be outclassed in that regard. He is a caster, that is the only playstyle that makes sense on him. He was unique in the marksmen department with the poke playstyle. No other marskman plays like that, every single one of them builds AS and crit but Varus' playstyle was unique among them. This can't be solved by buffing his numbers, Varus is never gonna be better than Jinx, Kalista, Tristana etc.. as an attack speed champion

So if you won't bring back his old playstyle since we all know you don't go back on your balance changes, he should be reworked into a more unique ADC.

I suggest making his kit scale with crit, maybe his Q, like Xayah does. If he's a marksman why isn't he scaling with crit? All the marksmen that don't scale with crit are unviable unless the meta involves something broken like old lethality.

19 Comments

Nick Da Chip3 votes

I would be so sad if they changed varus' significantly.

Also, I would argue Varus' is an attack speed hero. His whole kit is about popping blight. He is all about the blight. Popping blight is also a lot of fun. How do you build up blight if not for AS? It was cool he had a long range AD ability in piercing arrow, but it always felt like a secondary playstyle. He is literally blight man with scarf.

His cool down are so high though, you have to be really careful about zoning or you lose out on damage. I think that is his biggest problem.

HalcyonDweller1 votes

IMO Blight should be moved to his passive and he should get a new W ability.

Nick Da Chip2 votes

I think that would make him a little too strong honestly.

AirKingNeo1 votes

except that means he loses a fuck load of attack speed.

Nick Da Chip1 votes

That's true. I suppose that would make his early game a little worse during trading. His level 1 would be really strong with thunderlords in that case though.

His W is really overloaded though. Certain other champs have overloaded passives as well, but they are usually problematic. At least it seems that way amount the community :p

HalcyonDweller1 votes

I don't think it would be a problem if the attack speed was granted on proccing blight, and if the numbers for blight damage and the attack speed were tuned down to be balanced as a passive.

Hayaishi21 votes

[{quoted}](name=Nick Da Chip,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=JyGA0P4x,comment-id=0000,timestamp=2017-10-05T23:44:44.713+0000)

I would be so sad if they changed varus' significantly.

Also, I would argue Varus' is an attack speed hero. His whole kit is about popping blight. He is all about the blight. Popping blight is also a lot of fun. How do you build up blight if not for AS? It was cool he had a long range AD ability in piercing arrow, but it always felt like a secondary playstyle. He is literally blight man with scarf.

His cool down are so high though, you have to be really careful about zoning or you lose out on damage. I think that is his biggest problem.

If he was an attack speed hero he'd actually have a good steroid. Why would anyone use Varus as an attack speed hero if everyone else is better in that regard. His DPS is gated by his abilities, since without them you can't pop blight, other heroes with similar stacking mechanics are not gated by long ass cooldowns like Varus.

Also why do we need more adcs with stacking mechanics? We already have many and they are ALWAYS stronger than Varus when it comes to that due to steroids/mobility etc, why not rework him into an actually unique ADC? Literally both of his abilities are lackluster and there's little reason to use them outside of proccing blight.

Nick Da Chip1 votes

His passive steroid is really strong to make up for it's specific condition though. Killing a minion before trading isn't too troublesome anyways.

Also, isn't varus' one of the first stacking ADC's? He's practically retro by now.

Anyways, other adcs do outperform him at full build, that's just the nature of adcs. This is a team game though and his ult adds all kind of utility.

I mean if they are gonna change him, I would hope they would just go ahead and turn him into an AP marksman. The blight popping is just too much fun.

Hayaishi21 votes

[{quoted}](name=Nick Da Chip,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=JyGA0P4x,comment-id=000000010000,timestamp=2017-10-06T02:57:05.515+0000)

His passive steroid is really strong to make up for it's specific condition though. Killing a minion before trading isn't too troublesome anyways.

Also, isn't varus' one of the first stacking ADC's? He's practically retro by now.

Anyways, other adcs do outperform him at full build, that's just the nature of adcs. This is a team game though and his ult adds all kind of utility.

I mean if they are gonna change him, I would hope they would just go ahead and turn him into an AP marksman. The blight popping is just too much fun.

Fun is subjective, W has never been the defining ability of Varus, It was always piercing arrow. Blight stacks are just there. He is an archer, and his defining ability has always been his Q, as stated by his champion reveal article. it is only logical that his kit is based around his Q.

HalcyonDweller1 votes

Thematically blight is very core to his character. It couldn't hurt to move blight to his passive and give him another archer ability on his W.

I think Teridax68 said it best:

{quoted}

Have the new W be a simple, fire-and-forget nuke. For example, Varus could target an area, fire an arrow there that would stick to the first enemy hit, and have it explode after a delay. That way, he could always have a way of detonating Blight, and making it AoE could allow it to combo with Hurricane for mass detonations. Giving Varus a whole set of long-ranged actives would solidify his place as a long-ranged marksman.

GrievousFetus2 votes

I posted this idea in another thread. What if blight stacks had their damage reduced drastically, but their cap increased or even removed, and Rain of Arrows created a zone on the ground that also did persistent damage and incrementally applied blight stacks over time instead of detonating them.

Then, Q wouldn't just poke blight stacks, they'd pop them and carry a portion of the damage from the popped stacks (all of them if it kills the target) to the next target. My idea was that Varus' play pattern would revolve around prolonged debilitation of the front line, and then with enough investment he could weaponize a team's own frontline against their back line by applying a portion of the tank's blight stack damage to carries.

HalcyonDweller2 votes

This is a very cool idea!

GrievousFetus2 votes

Thanks. I've been toying recently with the idea of transferred %hp damage. Since tanks have way more hp %hp damage obviously does more damage to them in terms of raw damage, but functionally it does the same portion of effective health to all enemies (it actually does a little less to tanks in those terms because they have more resists), so if you took say, 10% max hp damage, applied that to a tank's health pool, and then transferred even a portion of that flat damage value to a carry with a much smaller health pool, it could work out to be upwards of 20% max hp worth of damage on that carry.

You can do this with %current and %missing hp damage too. If you had for instance a skill that did transferable %missing hp damage you could say, hit a target with only a tiny sliver of their hp left, radically overkilling them, and then transfer that flat damage value to a target who'd ordinarily take almost no damage from %missing hp damage because they were full health. I think it's a clever way of incentivizing a specific target, having conditional damage used on a target that meets those conditions be transferred to targets that don't meet the conditions to take larger amounts of damage than normal.

Voluug131 votes

If they bring back AP Varus I am happy.

Nick Da Chip1 votes

Isn't ap varus stronger than ever since they changed his ult? DFG was a nice addition but it's not really necessary.

Veraska1 votes

Id rather we avoid making champions whose game play is long range no retaliation poke

AirKingNeo1 votes

It's called heavy engage.

iLBGAMing1 votes

Tbh as a Varus main, I have to say that his kit is really just awkward to use he can poke with his abilities but at the same time he can abuse high attack speed to pop blight which is meh.

What I think they should do is stick to having him be as a caster ADC but give him a new way of emphasising the whole Blight idea. Possibly give him higher range? Or have it when Varus periodically attacks the same enemy that he would start spreading the blight stacks to nearby enemies (not like 3 stacks instantly to other enemies ofc) but this would encourage an attack speed kit so I am kinda against that even if it would sound interesting.

Also praise the Varus mains item 3070

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