The New Rift Herald is about to be a bigger Balance Problem

For those that don't know, the new Rift Herald will give you a buff which allows you to summon the Rift Herald in a given lane, where it'll go down and smash down towers (ignoring minions and champions).

It is not a fun game mechanic, either for the team using it or the team defending against it. The team using it makes no choice/gameplay with it other than which lane and when to deploy it. They don't interact with it, control it, and it doesn't do anything for their team other than harass the enemy team. The team defending against it is forced to fight this monster that ignores them.

It definitely will have strategic value in terms of opening up rotations for macro play, but even for the high level of play where this even matters, it will still be seen more as something that's necessary than as something that's engaging or fun. In lower elos it'll just be seen as annoying and/or useless.

And ultimately, if it's any good it's going to be nerfed because of how un-interactive it is, so it'll end up being fairly useless and never taken, which leaves us where this change was supposed to fix in the first place.