Trynd is a bit too weak in the preseason (serious)

The overall damage output of ad items has been reduced and replaced with other things. Like movement speed, sustain, unique effects and so on.

I really appreciate that. I enjoy the variety of unique effects and being able to combine them with the new masteries in interesting ways.

However, Tryndamere's play pattern was design for a different era. He needs to be able to push as much damage in 5 seconds as he can, and currently the damage he can push out at most item breakpoints is about 20% lower if you calculate it.

The items provide other things, but very few are useful to Trynd. The damage reduction on phantom dancer really isn't all that useful, and the damage delay on death's dance just ends up killing him after his ult. The changes to shiv do not align with Tryndamere's pick pattern and the buffs to and availability of lifesteal actually make the relative uniqueness and worth of Tryndamere's exceptional early Q sustain less exceptional.

Another point is the fact that if you are in a skirmish with someone and you have 60% crit chance (PD and IE), you could potentially crit them 3 times in a row, and in that time span have much higher average damage per second than you have actually bought. This volatility is what makes crit interesting, and is highly dependent on IE for maximal effect. Trynd cannot maximize on that volatility anymore because he cannot rush IE-- its a bad rush item now. This means he is forced into a more attack speed, high crit chance and sustained damage pattern.

Tryndamere is in a deficit for attack speed because he has so much attack damage and crit chance already, and on live you can remedy that in order to maximize the balance of his physical stats (and therefore his average sustained damage output) by investing heavily into attack speed-- zephyr, phantom dancer, botrk, for example. But attack speed has been reduced across the board, so he can't "balance for the offset" of his wonky stats as early as he needs to.

The short of it is that Trynd relied on doing as much damage as possible in 5 seconds, and now everyone in the game who relies on physical auto attacks, including Trynd, does less damage over 5 seconds. Its good that physical damage dealers are less about their raw auto attacks and more about their abilities and effects and steroids now-- team fights are more interesting and each auto attacker feels much different.

But Trynd is just weak. His kit is literally only as powerful as his items. He has no on demand steroid, let alone a buff to an on demand steroid like all the marksmen. 5 seconds of death immunity is totally irrelevant if you don't do enough damage to turn a fight during that time. 35% crit chance and 25-60 attack damage means nothing if you don't have the attack speed to multiply it. Massive sustain isn't special anymore if everyone has it.

Ad physical auto attackers like marksmen (as a class) are almost the easiest class of champions in the game to counterbuild. Technically the easiest champion class to counterbuild is Tryndamere-- he is in his own class. Fiora isn't a part of that class because of %hp true damage, Yi is immune to attack speed slows and has true damage, and Yasuo has large amounts of %bonus armor pen, and all of the above have ways to contribute very significantly without being directly in melee range. He has all the weaknesses of an auto attack reliant marksman without any range or any steroid focused on making counterbuilding him harder. In fact, with the change to randuins omen his crit steroid makes him even easier to counterbuild.

What that means it that his damage pattern is very stark. The difference between fiora, yasuo, and yi hitting a tank versus hitting a squishy is nill, moderate, and significant respectively, but the difference between Trynd hitting a tank and hitting a squishy is like comparing the sun to a flashlight.

And now he's too dim to be a spectacle anymore. One of the biggest appeals of Trynd was the spectacle of his crits.

He needs to be less reliant on bonus crit damage from infinity edge early on, and just plain needs more damage output, especially later in the game. I suggest giving him some bonus crit damage innately. Going from 2.0 to 2.5 is a 25% damage increase, but going from (2.0 + a) to (2.5 + a) is less than a 25% damage increase, so the presence of bonus crit damage in his kit would actually reduce his reliance on infinity edge, and would reinforce his reliance on fury early on.

In his current state I have no reason to hold onto fury. I will just generate it so fast and create so much sustain anyway, that there just isn't a point. And the sustain I would gain from warlord capstone isn't a given, as I might want the stormraiders-- and even if I have it often the additional sustain is superfluous.

#Here is a list of his problems:

1. He needs to feel like he has to manage his fury and he doesn't currently feel like that
2. He needs to be less reliant on an early IE, because keeping IE strong as a rush item creates problems for marksmen
3. His damage pattern needs to feel like Trynd, not like Yi; a few big hits, not a lot of little ones
4. He needs more damage especially later in the game, but it should feel rewarding to counterbuild him