What a tragedy

I dont mind the hilt nerfs for darius, that would only reinforce the idea that you must hit with the blade or suffer, but passive nerfs (what I consider an actual nerf to his maximum potential)...

Here you have a champion who was fine for so long, and out comes this stupid keystone and meta that propel him to the forefront as the only legitimate top lane counter to all these otherwise broken tanks like poppy coming out. And when CoC gets its second nerf and the meta inevitably changes, we may be left with a much weaker champion than we had originally.

I advise that you look over these darius nerfs before going through with them, and take into account that you are already addressing issues that propelled him to where he is now. Nerfing both things at the same time can potentially dumpster him.

If it truly is necessary, it may be better to even out his noxian might passive so instead of going from 40 to 200 and jumping erratically at different almost random levels, it is a more smooth curve that starts at 30 and goes to 200 with each level granting 10 ad on passive proc. That would make the might a lot more predictable than its current scaling (which even I dont really know exactly because it's quite erratic especially at early levels where you go a few levels with it remaining unchanged). It will also tone down his level one which can be stupid at times.

It would be improper to nerf a champion's late game when that champion's late game isnt even all that amazing.

TL;DR riot is already addressing issues that made darius perhaps too viable (CoC is the main offender and is going to get another round of nerfs). Before nerfing darius himself, a champion who has remained untouched for quite some time, see where he lands after you nerf these keystone/meta shifting objects that made him better. It wasn't even until the whole pre season changes that people complained about darius (and even then people dont complain about him as much as poppy) anyways.