Thanks for turning Gragas into a **** tier champion.

This is what I see:

I only play champions that are overpowered or broken, and when something happens to them so they're not 100% pick or 100% ban, I get mad and rage on the Boards.

Uuumm... what? You are so late with this it isn't even funny. He's still good, his whole role just completely changed. He still initiates, but I haven't seen Gragas go mid ever again. Mainly Top or Jungle since his close range combat is pretty good now with mobility focused much more around initiation than Assassin-like mobility or mobility good in middle lane.

The story of Gragas's treatment at the hands of the Riot balance team is so sad.

For a long time, Gragas was a high skill cap champion who enjoyed a decent win rate in solo queue and saw occasional picks in competitive play on team comps that valued his safety, skirmishing power, and late game disruption. He was a strong and very safe laner, who offered great team utility at the cost of raw late game damage output. Although he consistently saw competitive picks, he was never pick-or-ban and he never passed 50% win rate in solo queue.

Riot rightly decided he was a little too safe and too mobile, which was fair. So they decided to reduce his mobility by increasing the CD on body slam greatly if the ability didn't collide with an enemy, and reducing its CD if it did collide with an enemy. This was a totally reasonable change that would have left him in a fine place.

However, Riot didn't just want to slap him with straight nerfs (because he didn't really deserve them). Riot just wanted to reduce his frustrating safety and mobility in lane. So, they decided to offer him a compensation buff. Before that patch, body slam always split its evenly between all targets hit. Body slam had a VERY high base value, but it ended up doing very little damage unless the target was isolated. Riot totally removed the damage splitting without reducing its base damage at all.

So, in an attempt to make Gragas a little less safe, but reward him a bit more for putting himself at risk, Riot accidentally gave him a MASSIVE damage buff, while simultaneously removing a good portion of his skill cap and removing a huge form of counterplay. Suddenly, Gragas is dealing 300 base AoE damage on a hard to dodge dash with a 6 base CD. Suddenly, he's pick or ban in competitive play and absolutely dominating Solo Queue, because Riot massively buffed his already strong laning and gave him some of the highest AoE damage output in the game.

So, instead of simply reverting the buff, Riot turns him into overpowered bruiser with insane base damage, high mobility, insane utility, and near-infinite sustain in lane. So, instead of going back to the drawing board, Riot simply slaps him with massive number nerfs. So now Gragas is an underpowered, boring AP bruiser/tank who is outclassed by most of the other tanky AP top laners (maokai comes to mind).

Gragas was one of the first champions I ever mained. I picked him up in late S1/early S2, and he continued to be one of my favorite champions up until the bruiser rework. If I sound frustrated, it's because I am.