I think there are two changes that could be made to Skarner to really help him out without pushing him into OP territory. The first would be his E its low damage, decent slow, low speed, and low range. Little about this ability is any good other than the fact it adds a mark to your target. An increase in its range would make it so much more usable for ganks, escapes, etc without really changing its impact on targets. Another change that could also be done to his E with the range buff would be to have it pierce targets, but I think that might be to much. The second buff to him that I would love to have happen is to have his passive stun be buffed, ether by making it a flat 1 sec stun at all levels or just buffing the numbers at all stages to something like .75/1/1.25. Currently at the early and most of the mid game his passive is all windup and little reward. It just seems strange they do a whole rework around this new passive only to have it be so underwhelming to pull off, though I do love to hear that ring, pure music.
The thing that really gets me is that these sort of changes are just number changes. So many other champs go patch after patch getting tweak this way, Skarner post rework one nerf than out of sight out of mind.