op is right. Nasus in season 2 was a high risk high reward champ. Piss poor early game that many champs could abuse and if the game ended before 25 minutes he would be more or less useless, but would significantly tilt favour to his team past that mark.
Slowly, they changed his stacking mechanics - stacks like twice as fast. Buffed his passive for some reason, and then runes reworked came. Now he can get biscuits and stuff and not have mana issues and generally has a much stronger early game from bone plating revitalize etc.
Then, for some ridiculous reason, they went and made his ult the biggest stat ball possible. Mr, armor, cdr on Q, bonus range on Q when all he had before was 300 health and magic damage per second.
He gets a full cloth armor, 2/3rd a null magic mantle, and 50% cdr on Q in addition to 300 health and magic damage per second. The gold value of his rank 1 ult is like 300 + 300 + bamis (900) and that 50% q cdr given its his primary damage ability is also worth quite a bit of gold. 1500 + 500 = 2k gold on his ult. Its ridiculous.