I feel safe in saying anyone with eyes agrees that Rift Herald needs a nerf, so lets talk about how

There are a LOT of problems with current rifty, but the bottom line is he(She?(it?)) is warping the game in an extremely un-healthy way. I waited tell I've seen Rifty in game at least 10 times before I made this post, and every single time I have thought to myself WOW this is absurd. Not just this is a little powerful, not just "man that really did work well", but "how the hell did that make it through testing, I'm the one using Rifty and I feel bad winning with it".

Lets start by better understanding how Rifty works from a design perspective. I actually am not in protest of the core design. Using Rifty to take towers is a very unique power that provides a compelling reward for the top side objective. By having Rifty not give gold straight up and instead give it's value through killing towers it effectively gives gold and map control, however the key is towers can only be killed once. Yes you might take mid tower and get the gold from it, but late game when all the outer towers are dead you have actually not netted any gold. It reinforces Rifty as a mid game power play that give mid game power while having less impact on the late game power it gives. Over all fine stuff, is this the best design for Rifty? Probably not, but everything takes iteration to improve, just look at the jungle items.

But here's the thing, currently Rifty if used with even solo Que level of team coordination is basically a free tower. Ok, 100 global gold, 250 local for a total of 750 gold for a epic objective? That's kinda fair. Dragon used to be 190 global for a total of 950 gold but the map control gained from killing a tower is close enough that it seems fair to relate them as equal. But here's the thing...dragon back in the day was broken. Taking dragon was even more important than it is now. Even more concerning than it being more powerful than current(non fire) dragon is the old design of dragon was fundamentally broken. Having an epic objective who's main value is gold has numerous design problems. Riot clearly knows this and that is why Riftys power is theoretically not just packed in gold, it's also through map control. Additionally the fact that you can only kill Rifty once helps some other stress points old dragon had. Except...what about this little thing called "first tower gold"? That adds 300 gold to Rifty's value in a high number of games pushing just it's gold value 100 MORE than old dragon. The map control is extra, so we have an objective that about has hard to take as dragon that gives at least as much as dragon, perhaps a large deal more if it gets first tower. All things considered, actually I'm ok with this. Rift NEEDS to be very powerful to be attractive and do it's job. While Rift may be easier to take it does require more time than dragon, without the duo bot lane to help out it's harder to get the man power and the mechanics of the eye make it easier to contest. Again is it the absolute best design? Perhaps, perhaps not, but it's good enough.

So we have an objective that is very powerful that fills the needed roll of a top lane objective. It gives a very large mid game power bonus that tappers off as the game goes on. It will take some getting used to, but all in all I can see it finding a place in LOL.

ohh....wait...that's just if Rift takes one tower. With just the one tower you are certain to get(unless you are stupid in how you use it) Rift is already a very compelling objective. And this is what is creating the problem, a team with good team work can easily take 2 towers a very high amount of the time. 5 man group or 4 man group with one split pushing. You wait until you get an opening(someone gets a single kill anyplace on the map) before you pull the trigger, and boom if they either don't have the man power to contest, or with a split pusher if they do contest you get the other outer tower. If solo Que teams can get 2 towers 50% of the time just imagine what the pros are going to do with it. But we are not done! 2 towers? How about 4 towers, 2 kills and an inhibitor? That just happened to me, an even game lost in under 30 seconds. They got rift, waited tell they got a double kill mid, pushed all 3 mid towers, their top lane split while the our team tried and failed to not have our base killed losing two people in the process. There was basically no stopping it, which highlights Rifty's imminence lack of counter play. That power play quickly turned into a Baron which quickly turned into a 22min loss...from a dead even game. Just imagine what a team that is ahead can do with Rifty? Rifty taking 2 of your towers starts to look like you are getting off easy.

So how can we fix Rifty? The solution I'm proposing is that she has a "max case" built in. Her standard case is rather ok, it's powerful but all in all one tower is fine. The problem is her extreme cases that are actually really common right now. So the solution needs to lower her variability in a healthy way, the idea I've come up with is make her able to take exactly one tower, and then die after...let me explain.

So far I've been assuming she is taking a tower from full to dead in her value calculation, in reality this is not true. Most of the time she is used on a tower that already has damage on it and Rifty is used to finish the job. My idea is that she is aloud to take up to 100% total tower health, so she can take 1 full health tower or 2 half health towers and so on. Let means she is never actually gone after the first tower kill as towers are basically never at max health and this is only the damage Rifty personally does so minions and champs helping out do not apply. This retains the "run down your lane" idea that she is designed around, and lets people do some very powerful double tower plays. But what it stops is the extreme cases that again are way too common.

So that's the concept, but how do you actually mechanically implement that? Well the simple answer is add a "mana bar" type of UI above her head that tracks the damage she has done, when it's out she dies and call it a day. That would be a very large improvement over live, but we can do better. But being clever designers that we are, we can notice that she actually already has this resource, it's her health. Riot clearly understands a lot of the problems I've mentioned and have made a very solid attempt at designing around it by making her damage based on her current health. The counter play is suppose to be that as you poke her down you are lowering her damage. Good stuff Riot, it just needs to be taken one step further. Right now yes you can poke her down, and yes that lowers her damage, but until you kill her she will still roll down the lane. This creates a catch 22, damage Rifty to lower her threat, but every spell you spend killing Rifty is not spent on the 4 enemy champions that will glady take the tower them self. Yes you might stop Riftys damage but then you are not stopping the champion zoning and damage, so you still lose your tower. It feels hopeless, like there is nothing you can do. You can't wait out Rifty and are forced to action, but if the enemy team has a numbers or gold advantage fighting back will just get you killed.

Solution? Have her hurt herself when she hurts towers. It solves every problem while also reinforcing the counter play already built in. It has little effect on the base case, Rifty is still going to finish one tower. She starts at full health, does damage based on her current heath, put them together and she shreds her first target. If she hurts herself though then she will not take the 2nd target nearly as fast, but there will still provide a large enough threat that she needs to be dealt with. The more value you get from Rifty the harder it is to get additional value.

I could go on talking about how this change improves her counter play in multiple dimensions, but I'm running out of energy to keep typing. Frankly, I feel like I'm talking to a wall when I post on the forms here. It seems at times that Riot does not care, and while I know that is not true in the past I've spent hours writing a post only to be greeted with silence. To any red out there, a "I read this" would go a long way.

TLDR: Make Rifty damage it's self when it hurts towers