Can we please talk about Tahm Kench?
(All stats pulled from http://champion.gg/champion/TahmKench)
People in bronze and silver seem forever behind the times when it comes to bans. Either that or they waste bans on seemingly random champions. They also seem to be the ones most prone to throwing around terms like "broken," "OP," and "cancer" to describe particular champions. So I've come to expect some level of weirdness when it comes to bans.
However, I will never not shake my head whenever someone bans Tahm Kench, and I say this as someone with 100K mastery on him between my two accounts, TahmumuhaT and EkkoFroffles. His win rate has steadily declined since the start of season 6, dropping from 49.54-44.11% for support and from 52.87-46.89% for top. Likewise, his play rate has dropped from 3.22-2.67% for support and from 3.49-2.31% for top. The only players sporting over a 50% win rate on Tahm are the ones who've taken him top for 50+ matches.
To further put that into perspective, he's 24/25 (15.12) and 55/57 (15.4) for "playerbase average games played" in support and top respectively. This means your chances of running into a Tahm main who can maximize what power he still has left are pretty much nonexistent. In all likelihood, the Tahms you're banning out would improve your chances of winning rather than hinder them.
Moving on from there to the most common complaints, I'll start with the most popular target of scorn: his devour. He is a walking 
? While I'll give you that only Soraka rivals him when it comes to saving teammates, it's come at an ever-increasing cost. First the MS boost while running away was removed from devour, then the decay rate on his shield was nerfed. He was already dead if you had hard CC to stop him from activating his shield, and now he's assuming even more risk, just like everyone said they wanted. When I first started playing Tahm, I was all about those clutch saves on allies. Now I tend to save devour for enemies, as I'd rather take a nuisance out of fight than possibly hand the enemy a double kill trying to be team ambulance.
Enemy devour does too much damage? Except the one it hurts most is tanks, not your squishy carries. Did Tahm devour your tank? Then your team needs to take that opportunity to punish him while his devour is down. He has two health bars? Not with how fast his shield decays now and the ability to stop him from even activating it with any hard CC. He deals too much damage while building straight tank? For damage dealt, he's ranked 16/25 and 42/57 for support and top respectively.
All Tahm really excels at anymore is soaking up damage and not dying. For deaths, he's ranked 10/25 for support and 7/57 for top. In organized play, such as the LCS, this can still be strong, but ranked is another thing entirely. Why do you think I really only play him top anymore? There I can become a proper tank, maximizing both my damage and damage soaking thanks to having solo lane gold. Going support, you don't really get enough gold for any of that unless you get ahead. This is why this season I'm 3-0 with him top and 1-5 support.
In short, can the circlejerk about Tahm end already? Or is it bound to live on forever, just like certain other circlejerks, such as the one for Lee Sin? (Top playrate, 8th highest in playerbase, 44/48 in win rate, sub 49% win rate since 5.24, as well as sub 49% for even players with 125+ matches with him) It's bad enough my all-around favorite (and most played, aside from my first main, Garen) champion is on Riot's shit list. But I can't even play the guy half the time when I want to because he's banned, often by my own team? Come on, man.
