Hecarim is in dire need of buffs

Right now Hecarim is a trash tier champion. There is no reason to pick Hecarim unless you main him and enjoy playing him. If you want to climb and are looking to pick up a new champion, you should not choose Hecarim.

Proof:

http://champion.gg/statistics/#?roleSort=Jungle&sortBy=general.totalDamageDealtToChampions&order=descend

As a bruiser jungler, lower damage dealt to champions than full tanks like and . As top laner, bottom 15 lowest damage dealt to champions. Plummeting play rate. Higher than average death count, lower than average gold counts as top laner. Bottom 10 win rate of all junglers. Bottom 11 win rate of all top laners.

Reasons:

Hecarim lost 200 HP late game due to his nerfed scaling, nerfed base stats and nerfed Dead Man's Plate. This is a nerf of 700 effective HP or ~8% of Hecarim's late game tankiness. The new jungle items being higher in cost hurt him bad since he is a power spike reliant champion. He has a harder time laning now due to his passive being removed.

Jungle Hecarim is considered a late game champion among junglers. His late game was nerfed. Lane Hecarim is considered an early game snowball top. His laning phase was nerfed.

Why is Hecarim different scaling in different lanes? Simple: as a jungler, he is a tanky initiator with damage. These scale very well because most junglers either have sustained damage, burst damage or have tankiness + CC; Hecarim has a little bit of everything. This means that late game, he is a jack of all trades that can do alot of things for your team including peel, assassination and initiation. However, among top laners, you want specialization and strong dueling. Hecarim gets outscaled by anything with hybrid damage, ranged sustained damage or armor penetration. That is a significant pool of top laners.

Recommendations:

I believe that it is possible to balance Hecarim for both his top lane early game role and his jungle mid-late game role by keeping his base stats at level 1 as is, but increasing his HP per level scaling. I also recommend slightly increasing the bonus AD scaling on Q (perhaps by 5% or 10%), which would have nearly zero effect on his early game but increase his mid-game power spike which is important for both lane and jungle Hecarim.

This will still be an overall nerf for Hecarim compared to 5.22 due to the massive power loss of his base HP and passive loss.