"The only super interesting thing about skarner right now is his ultimate"

"To fix that, we're going to make it possible for the enemy team to deny him buffs!"

...

When I first read this, I was just... What?

"The enemy team can capture [the crystals] too and, when they do, they ... temporarily lock Skarner out from his super meaningful buffs." -Direct quote from here.

As somebody who loves Skarner (even though in the time I've played him, he generally hasn't been in a place where he could have been called "overpowered"), I am really skeptical about this idea. It all depends on what Riot means by "temporarily". Minutes? One minute? Thirty seconds? A few seconds?

Even just a few seconds of lock-out from a pivotal buff like Baron or Dragon can change the course of the game- to me, the most bizzare part is that it's a part of HIS kit, not someone's on the enemy team. It's like adding twice the number of buffs on the map that Skarner has to keep track of, only in this case, he absolutely MUST control them 100% of the time to ensure that he doesn't screw himself and his team over.

I'm a little biased since, as I said, I'm a huge Skarner fanboy, but out of all the potential juggernaut reworks, Skarner's seems like it has the biggest drawback for the least amount of rewards (well, except maybe Mordekaiser, depending on how they take this new approach to him. But either way, he gets a second dragon instead of having the potential to be locked out of it). Depending on the buffs he gets in the circle it might be somewhat worth it, but overall, it seems like more trouble for Skarner just to keep his access to something that is already open to everybody else. I think a safer approach would be to simply give Skarner debuffs while he's in enemy-captured circles.

Maybe I'm just paranoid and/or I'm overreacting and this could be an interesting change. But either way...

Please don't hurt the scorpion. He already lost his lore.