Can we have a serious moment of discussion about Maokai?

I'm actually seriously curious who thought these ideas were good together? And I don't mean this is as a "wah I died to saplings" post, this is a genuine "you fucked up with these changes". Maokai will probably never fulfill the tank niche he's supposed to properly while the current design choices are on his kit.

• High % max HP damage (8% base, doubled in brush)
• Super high AP scaling (like seriously 2% per 100 AP, or 1% per 50 AP, doubled in brush? Getting upwards of 40% max health damage isn't impossible or even hard)
• Stackable trap
• No diminishing returns
• Impossible to clear without risk of taking damage
• Throwing these all on a champion whose first designation is "tank". Seriously, Tanks aren't supposed to deal damage, I could have sworn that was the whole reasoning behind the Mid-year Tank Update in the first place? Was it not to lower the amount of damage output in favor of tankiness and utility?
• Almost forgot to mention the stupid "throw it in a bush for double damage" gimmick.

I.e. why do Maokai's saplings just ignore everything that Jhin's traps, Teemo's 'Shrooms, Shaco's Boxes etc. were given as counterplay? Because they're not invisible? They offer absurds amount of zone control and are only really countered by other oppressive mechanics (i.e. Zyra plants). 1 of them is enough to take anything that isn't a full-tank champion off the fields of justice while they return to base, an act that takes anywhere from 20-40 seconds. 2+ is enough to outright kill squishies and 4+ can basically kill anything that's not 3 tank items deep. Not to mention these traps provide zones of control for upwards of a minute and the cooldown is incredibly short even without CDR at 11 seconds.

Maokai was a fine champion before these changes. His ultimate was the only overbearing part of his kit but Riot chose to gut him in favor of a stupid trap gimmick. Literally just changing his ultimate and passive would have been more than enough to completely fix the design problems Riot had with Maokai's kit. Or was it because we wanted to try throwing Maokai into the jungle, when he was already good at jungling? Because now his jungle clear sucks and his ganks have no damage.

There can be argument that there are nerfs/changes on the PBE, however the issue is not the numbers or anything of the sort, it's the actual design philosophy behind the rework to begin with. The only truly problematic portion of Maokai's kit was his generic "I take less damage" ultimate. Which, by the way was just randomly re-applied to Galio in hideous fashion. In fact a lot of Galio's kit would have looked pretty good on Maokai with a few different twists which I think kind of emphasizes how generic Galio's rework was too (seriously the only "situational and unique" mechanic in Galio's kit is the strong magic damage shield), but that's a discussion for another day.

I don't expect the rework to be reverted (The only time Riot's owned up to a rework was the Kog'maw rework which was an obvious failure). However I believe moving the % health damage from his E back to his W and making the E ratio something like .4-.5 instead (or leaving the ratio low at like .3 and increasing the base damage) and leaving the double damage effect on is a much cleaner approach to handling Maokai as a champion. This alone would probably be enough to move Maokai back into the tank role and fix this gimmicky bullshit.

Saplings would then still be powerful, but Maokai would be rewarded more for going into the fray and playing as a tank rather than just hiding in the brush waiting for saplings to effectively remove an enemy champion off the map. This in turn favors a tankier build path and rewards maokai for playing to his strengths: A strong disruptor with lots of CC and self-healing, rather than playing to a "I deal retarded damage" wet-dream fantasy playstyle.