Taunt mechanic as a whole, and why Shen deserves a buff.

Taunt is a unique type of CC, it forces enemy champions to attack you. Theres currently three champions that possess such CC, they are . Let's compare and contrast each.

is a tank directly built to counter ADCs. the combination of tremor and powerball gives him a lot of damage and CC/gapcloser, while he gets free resistances and a thornmail on his W. his taunt is a click CC which increases the attack speed of those who he taunts, very useful vs ADCs which again, he's meant to counter. due to his ult affecting structures, he makes for an okay split push if you ever need him to split push, and since he uses mana, items that build off sapphire crystal are often good on him, like for a fantastic engage. He also has armor scaling on his passive, that gives him damage for building armor items, as well as up to a 90% bonus armor buff. which is fantastic.

Moving onto , he is meant to counter mages. the defining traits for galio are in three parts: AOE taunt, global ultimate and early damage. Let's first talk about his early game damage. At level 1, he's likely to take his Q, which gives him a spammable, fairly damaging poke ability, that does 50 damage with the tornado, as well as leaving a zone that does % hp damage after. as we all know having range toplane is huge, and if he's going midlane, the % hp damage will not matter, as he'll either go tank or ap both of which has a high potential to outlast or outburst whoever he lanes with. Galio's global ultimate grants his cast target 20-30% flat damage reduction, increased by the amount of mr he purchases. He also slams and knocks up everyone in about a full screen's worth of area which he can easily chain CC with his third major kit item: Aoe Taunt. which grants him 20-40% damage reduction, also scaling with ap and mr, which does comparable damage to rammus taunt, while also slowing his targets. All i really have to comment on this is that Galio makes for an hell of an engage followup, if say, someone like malphite ults into the enemy team. doesn't have to really hit anyone as it forces their front lines and carries to split while malphite runs them over.

now let's look at . He's a toplane tank that has max HP scaling shield on his passive, which can be permanently up late game with good management of his abilities, his twilight assault, which is basically attack speed steroids if he can land his spirit blade through an enemy, as well as doing % hp damage on his next three autos. spirit's refuge, which is an aoe dodge zone, taunt, which does damage scaling off his max hp, is his primary mobility spell and taunts every enemy champion hit, and his infamous ult, which defines him as a champion, channeling to save an ally, granting shield and teleporting to them after 3 second cast.

following so far? good. here's what my argument is:

While rammus lacks a global engage tool, the combination of him and items such as righteous glory and q makes his engage really strong, and there's the fact you can't really miss a click taunt, so he's very reliable and very tanky, especially with his w which gives him up to 90% of his armor, which makes the damage from his passive and thornmali pretty damn strong. Since he's a jungler, normally don't have to worry about taking damage or being harassed by enemy champions, and his ganks are really strong thanks to powerball.

Galio gets % damage reduction when he taunts, as well as granting it to whomever he ults to, has a knockup, good base damage and a poke harass ability he can spam in lane, which gives him a strong laning phase in combination to his W passive, which gives him a magic damage shield after not taking damage for a while, so he's basically guranteed to win most trades unless he really messes up. his ult is high impact, providing both damage reduction and a knockup, which means it's hard to engage on whoever he ulted as well as being a great engage tool, when paired with something along the lines of a lee sin or malphite who can dive deep into the enemy team and break the enemy formation or take the knockup.

meanwhile, Shen has no real innate damage reduction apart from his passive shield, which is strong, but here's the problem: a bulk of his dueling potential as well as resource (energy) is tied in with his taunt. if he misses it, he's out of that fight for good. rammus and galio being mana champions can just sit out on the sidelines for a few seconds and powerball/justice punch back into the action, however, shen does not have that luxury as once he goes in, it's a one way ticket. no damage reduction, no real energy to cast anything with. he's just there.

even comparing shen to galio, you can see that galio is a strictly better pick in most situations. Shen can't use his ult aggressively unless he wants to lose out on a fair chunk of his shield, and even the cast time of each respective ultimates are different. galio requires just over one second while shen requires a full three seconds. for reference, talon requires 1.5 seconds or so to do his full combo, so while galio could fly away without taking much damage, shen would have to talk talon's burst and some while the channel goes through... if it goes through. the difference in channel time also means there's that big a window of opportunity to disrupt the channel, and leave shen feeling sad that he couldn't make it to botlane or whatever.

this in itself is a big problem, as galio ultimate is fairly noticeable on whether or not he will make it, but since shen's ult takes three seconds, whomever he ulted may not realize his channel has ben cancelled, and re engage onto whoever they are fighting.

Tl;Dr I believe shen is losing his niche role as a protector of his team due to galio rework, and buffs would be nice to get him back into the spotlight, from being an "inferior galio" most of the time.

I personally suggest: reverting energy cost and energy pool back to 200. all other energy based champions have their energy maxed at 200, and has no abilities that cost over 100 except for kennen (lightning dash). this will make missing taunts a lot more forgiving and not drop him completely in a teamfight. Higher HP scalings on his e and HP scaling on his ult. Galio gives 8% bonus resistances per 100 mr he builds, which makes him scale considerably better with his ult, i believe shen could benefit from the similar treatment. as for his taunt, both galio and rammus have some means of increasing their tankiness without delay. i believe giving some resistance increase or immediate shield on his taunt would be helpful. making mana items viable on non-mana champions in general. sometimes you need the frozen heart passive, but you really shouldn't buy it because you're a manaless champion and your team flames you for building it. I believe there should be manaless alternatives for mana items such as righteous glory or frozen heart. basically do what riot did with biscult so we get a silghtly less cost effcient item, but all that money is not lost (eg, instead of 250 mana on righteous glory, it now gives +10 armor)

Edit: before people come in complaining about how much damage shen does, this is a result of aftershock and titanic hydra more than shen himself. Shen does no damage outside of his % max HP empowered auto attacks, and if that's what you're complaining about, mundo does 25% hp damage on cleaver, that slows, and is ranged