State of Rylais

Just going to open up with some facts:

There are 47 midlane meta champions from champion.gg, but we'll ignore Zed/Yasuo/Urgot/GP/Varus/Talon/Corki since they're either purely AD or played more AD centric than AP centric, leaving 40 midlane mages.

Out of the 40 mages, 22 (over 50% of mages!) have Rylais built in either their highest %build order, %build winrate or both according to champion.gg. The only mages that aren't building Rylais are mostly mages who already have a bunch of CC in their kit (Lux/Lissandra/Morg), or assassins who want burst over slows. We can see that basically if you have several damaging abilities and a lack of CC in your kit, Rylais is good to buy.

Now, my issue with Rylais is that non-targeted abilities (as the concept of them, not a specific ability) are only as healthy as you are able to dodge them, and non-targeted abilities are only as strong as you're able to land them. The skill needed to land a skill shot is diminished when your're able to stack extra skill shots due to the enemy's inability to get out of the way in time due to being slowed.

Some examples of where skill is being removed by stacking abilities after landing a slow:

• Cho can W someone and slow them to follow up with his Q. They're silenced and slowed with really only Cho'Gath there to misplay rather than you to outplay him.
• Viktor can Q -> land laser -> land laser
• Taliyah just needs land a single shot from her Q to chain the remaining shots.

Additionally, there are champions who just want to stick to you and the slow just makes the champion easily do so:

• Swain just sits in his ult form and can stack his snared on you whenever it's up because you can't get away fast enough.
• Vlad just spams Q/E and you can't abuse his lack of hard CC due to the constant slows.
• Kennen ults you and you can't get out because you're slow ed and then stunned.

Secondly on what I dislike about Rylais: The item is heavily team oriented AND player oriented. Compare this to an item like Ludens, the item is focused a lot on the buyer since the MS buff is only on the buyer and doesn't provide any utility beyond damage. Rylais benefits the whole team by providing AoE slows (which can be used either to stack other abilities, disengage a fight, or simply make a pick) and benefits the buyer with the 400 health.

Where am I going? Rylais is strong. The item has become a question of "When DON'T I buy this item" rather than, "when DO I buy this item?". The item is gold efficient and fixes a champions issue of landing their non-targeted abilities while also being a huge benefit to teams.

Since I don't think you should really complain without giving any suggestions, I have a thoughts on how the item should be changed.

The item is in almost every pro-game and is part of (though not entirely) why Azir/Swain/Vlad/Viktor are common/contested picks. Gutting the item will have very large impact on the meta in pro-play and will even hurt the meta outside of pro-play. Because we can't just gut/remove the item, it needs to be moderately weakened. Of the following, I'd like to see really any of the changes and of any combination of them (having all of them might be a bit extreme for the item)

I would like to see the total cost increased 50-100 gold so that buying the item does create some extra time to abuse the expensive buy while in laning phase. Because of the two other bigger issues that the item needs addressed (slow/health) the gold increased needs to be minimal.

Because of how strong the slows are, and the fact that swifties have gotten nerfed, the AoE slow should be reduced to 35-30% from 40%. This will allow for some extra outplay potential if you get hit by an AoE ability and might be able to actually dodge incoming abilities.

Finally, I'd like to see the health be reduced by 50-100 (more likely 100 for better looking numbers). The item makes the buyer tanky as an AP champion. With the team utility and ability to provide some self-peel, the champion just becomes annoying to kill if you get to them.

One other change that may work is straight up reduce the slow% on AoE abilities, but then also have all the slows scale with levels.

Anyways, I'm hoping for more of a discussion. Thoughts?