RIOT: Let's talk about Udyr.

It's pretty common knowledge now that Udyr has an extremely high winrate. Now, I know that a high winrate does not exactly mean that the CHAMPION is OP, but I'll get into that.

When a champion has a 58% winrate, I think we can agree that something is wrong. That much is certain. However, there have been no stat changes (correct me if I'm wrong) to Udyr himself in the past few patches, and yet his winrate has been on the rise.

The cause for this is unknown, but here are my observations.

His playrate has been going up. Perhaps Udyr has always been OP, but his winrate was bogged down by T2g fanboys and the "eh, let's do an Udyr game" type of players. I may be biased because he's my main, but it does seem that he's been quite powerful for a while.

The conclusion most people have come to, however, is an itemization change. It's highly likely that the cheap movement speed from Runic Echoes opened up an MS-centric build path that wasn't exactly viable before. A high base MS mitigates what seems to be Udyr's biggest weakness: being kited.

I'd have to say the latter is more likely based simply upon the winrate spike that occurred when RE was released.

The next step is to find a way to nerf Udyr in a way that brings down his winrate safely.

The first train of thought by most is to nerf Udyr directly. Nerf his R scaling, nerf his R base damage, nerf his base MS, nerf his W shield, nerf his E MS, etc. This all sounds great, until you realize that the RE build is currently his best-case scenario. If we nerf his abilities that synergize with both RE and his other build paths, it will bring the RE build to a normal winrate but cause his other builds to plumment in winrate. This destroys the diversity of his kit and build options and should be a last resort, at least in my opinion. I'd hate to see Tiger Udyr ruined because some cheesy AP item made Udyr run kinda fast early on. Lol.

A few days ago, in a different thread, I proposed lowering the MS on RE from 10% to 6%, to make it exactly 60% as effective as Luden's statwise. This seems like a decent option, mostly because the MS part of the stats really only synergizes with Udyr. It's more of a "bonus" on most others. This is somewhat of a viable way we could go about nerfing what is making him so oppressive, his ability to stick to a champion. Swifties and Deadman's are both getting price increases and Deadman's is getting a slow decrease, so all of this combined could be exactly what is needed to bring Udyr down to normal levels.

However, someone in another thread had a great idea to nerf Udyr that I honestly think could be the solution.

No stat changes to RE, just a simple usagr change. Make the 10% MS be out-of-combat MS. Udyr likes RE purely because it lets him turn into Sanic. His AP ratios suck, so Devourer and Cinderhulk are much better on Phoenix Udyr than RE statwise. Every other user of RE (again correct me if I'm wrong) doesn't really NEED this bonus MS in-combat, and since Udyr is abusing it in-combat, this could easily be all that is needed to combat his winrate (along with the aforementioned item nerfs on PBE).

Let me know what you think below (: