So Is Skarner going to get any love?

Skarner is a champion very few of you probably play or see in your games, but as someone who's mained him even since picking up the game in season 4, it brings me less and less satisfaction to play him with every successive patch. Currently, after many successive nerfs to his kit, then to his core item, then finally to all items he builds in the recent tank update, he's been left in the dust. Skarner maintains a 0.3% playrate, played only by his dedicated mains and the occasional person who misclicks their S named champions in champ select. On top of this he sits at a 48.7% winrate, which is sad considering the only people who make up his playerbase are very well practiced at the champion. Skarner's identity, or at least what he was originally intended to be, was as a very sticky melee fighter, and his fighting capabilities have gone down drastically for several reasons.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Champion, Skarner's Q has no base damage, his W has no base shield, and passive only scales with levels. This makes him incredibly feast or famine, and incredibly reliant on levels to succeed at all. In the recent tank update, where health was cut from all the items Skarner usually builds: randuins, spirit visage, deadmans, etc. his tankiness took a massive hit. Not only to his base health pool which was already mediocre, but more importantly to his main source of tankiness: his shield. Since his shield has no base scaling, only % health scaling, every hit to his health pool hits him even harder by reducing his shield power. Also for those of you who don't know, his movement speed bonus on his W only lasts while the shield lasts (and takes 3 seconds to ramp up), so as soon as you pop his now smaller shield, you kill his speed and only initiation tool. The compounding changes have nerfed his tanikness and only reliable source of mobility VERY hard, and a squishy, slow fighter is a useless fighter.

And though these nerfs have been felt hard, the real painful nerf came from reducing the damage on iceborn gauntlet, Skarner's #1 core item. Most of Skarner's dueling power comes from sheen procs, and a while back the damage on iceborn was reduced from 125% base AD to 100% base AD, which cut a big chunk out of Skarner's sustained damage. Even worse though, Skarner has received no compensation or buffs or changes of any kind to help him out.

In fact it seems like he's been forgotten entirely. Over a year ago Riot deemed his rework a failure and said they should not have grouped him in with the juggernauts, and that he was in need of a full VGU. A year ago Riot Repertiore said he had real Skarner changes in store to help our poor scorpion out, but not a single change has been given to him in either the pre-season or mid-season or any time in between. So I have to ask, is there anything us Skarner mains can look forward to in the future of our champion? Because his current state is nothing less than a disappointing mess.