The Veigar Changes: All-Out Math

Tl; dr: The changes are in a good direction, but Veigar's burst is not made up for with the removal of DFG, and he has to land 40% of his Q's on two minions after the change in order to break even before the R nerf. He needs a little more work.

The Excel file where the numbers came from is linked at the bottom along with assumptions.

I'd like to start off by saying I do like the flavor of the changes and their direction. The Q change adds a lot of versatility into his kit in order to boost his laning. It gives him the ability to farm at range, while at the same time lets him have a poke that he can twist through minions in order to hit his lane opponent without getting too close. I even approve of making the stun cage delayed so that you can rebudget some power. However, people don't play Veigar to poke through minions or tweak an enemy's nose in preparation. People play Veigar to delete people. And with people being able to "dodge" his cage, even by staying inside it, leaves them able to avoid the burst that was previously guaranteed. The meteor in particular is going to be nearly impossible to land on the intended target, and based on his previous numbers he's going to need every bit of his damage in order to make up the difference.

What I want to be done is for Riot to remember just why they were making these changes in the first place. I like the reshuffling of power, but that's almost all it is. There is almost no power added in order to make up for an item that was completely core to his pattern being removed. Veigar needs a little more love or he's going to fall behind, especially right now when mobility is such a strong factor in the meta. His previous defense against those mobile opponents, when someone jumped on him, was to put the cage down to stun and then delete them before they recovered from it. Now, he no longer has that defense as the cage is much easier to dodge, and without the cage so is about 30% of his burst, and without DFG that means he's missing about half of his burst before it's removal. The nerf to R is only exacerbating this.

Edit: (Adding this paragraph to include my reply with an idea to help fix it.) His E does need some degree of counterplay since an enemy walking into it is a potentially guaranteed kill. I don't mind that it has counterplay added in the delay. However, he needs to be able to hit his W in order to keep his burst up. Reducing the delay on his meteor to the point where an enemy has to make a comparatively light investment in boots in order to avoid it would help him quite a bit. In addition, potential "free" harass while ignoring minion waves can be mitigated by making the meteor deal less damage the further from the point of impact you are.

I realize this will likely get left in the dust compared to all of the mass of other topics talking about the Veigar changes, but oh well. I'll provide a bit of evidence.

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Looking at the Numbers

The metric I used to measure the effectiveness was the raw damage in Veigar's burst, coming from a combination of Q, W, and R. In the cases where DFG was used, it was included in the rotation. It should be noted that the additional HP% damage from DFG wasn't even included in the calculations to even further highlight the discrepancy, only the damage amp. HP% is harder to accommodate for given the wild variance in HP of targets.

Comparing Veigar directly before and after the changes, his damage is directly less. Assuming that Q is used every time it is ready in order to get the maximum value out of changes to its cooldown, Veigar's burst loses ~220 damage at Lv18, based on the nerf to his ultimate. That's about 7% nerf to his overall burst compared to his current, live state.

Looking at the percentage of double-hits required, 40% of the new Veigar's Q's need to kill two minions in order to even out from before the changes without DFG. That's the closest result from the direct percentage values I ran for, since I incremented the percentages by 10%. In truth it's somewhere between 40-50% in order to fully even out the nerf to his R's ratio. Considering the majority of his stacks will come from later in the game where he can probably one-shot minions with it, this isn't too far-fetched. But it does nothing to make up for the loss of DFG.

Even if Veigar double-hits on every one of his Q's, he will still do ~400 less damage (without counting %HP from DFG) than his DFG build at Lv18. That means that this is a pretty significant nerf compared to his pre-DFG state. His burst is both offense and defense for him, and I know that even if you don't like how strong his burst was, it's why people played him. That's a 10% direct loss in power, again without the %HP nuke from DFG.

Veigar won't even out to DFG damage until the point where he would have previously been at 400 stacks, with double kills on every stack. That's pretty ridiculous. It's saying that if the game goes on for more than an hour, that's the only point where he'll even be able to pretend his burst was the same as with DFG. And again, that's if every stack he would have gotten with previous CD's is a double kill.

Increasing pre-change stacks by 50 will lower the percentage of required double-kills by ~5%. That's a pretty tall order. Those double kills might not be so hard to come by the later you go, but the higher that base number of stacks go, the more difficult it becomes for Veigar to have been meeting that standard before.

Like I said, I realize there's some utility in Q added, but he's also losing utility and a lot of safety on his E in exchange. In addition, as stated previously he's losing a huge chunk of his burst in the newfound difficulty in landing his meteor on an unstunned target. Please keep this in mind.

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Math File and Assumptions

Boring stuff here. If you tl;dr a lot, just skip this.

The following principles were used in order to determine relative power, items, etc. at points in the game.

1. Average general breakpoints were used in time based on levels 1, 2, 6, and 18, scaling linearly between these levels.
2. Gold is determined based purely on a gold per minute standard. Gold per minute was scaled back from LCS top scorers to 350 gpm to better reflect a more average player. (LCS records link: http://na.lolesports.com/na-lcs/2015/spring/stats )
3. Static builds were assumed, with the build order assumed at the bottom.
4. Items were assumed to be built immediately upon reaching the required gold.
5. Recipe items' AP values only include the amount added by creating the recipe, and not the components' AP.
6. Runes were raw AP quints and blues, with 21-0-9 on masteries focusing on the AP side of offense.
7. Ability max order was assumed as RQWE. I realize this is not necessarily standard but is quicker to illustrate power discrepancies.
8. Q stack standard was assumed to be 150 at 35 minutes for pre-change Veigar. Findings based on varying this value noted above.
9. Q stack at a given level was taken by simply dividing the total number at Lv18.
10. Cooldown differences were used to scale the standard number of Q stacks' differences into a "new" value based on the CD change. This was done summarily per level in order to keep up with the original expectations of stacking.

If you plan on toying around in the file for numbers, I recommend only changing the values below the huge blob of numbers. These are basically the inputs. I didn't fancy it up; I was mostly doing it for the chart. But I welcome people to use the file to see more about the results of this change to Veigar's burst.

Input variables include: Cooldown changes (before and after) Raw AP from runes/masteries Item builds, in order, up to supposed gold at 35 minutes Gold per minute Q stacks at 35 minutes AP raw power and ratios in before and after states

Link to the math file (Excel): https://www.dropbox.com/s/ca7j35u8d9ujevr/Veigar_DFG.xlsx?dl=0

(Sorry, I don't know how to do the fancy horizontal lines to make this more readable.)