@repertoir Gragas is incredibly weak atm and has been for a while now, but a few changes could help

I'd like to preface this by saying that everything I am about to say comes from someone who dearly loves ap Gragas and has more games on him than any champion, not like it should matter though. Gragas, according to lolalytics and champion.gg, is now just above a 44% winrate, which makes him as bad as nerfed azir even after being not nearly as difficult and pro-stompy as a champion. He has sat at below 47% winrate for over 6 months now.

I believe the reason for Gragas' extremely low performance is due to the fact that his current incarnation as a champion is in a bad state where his kit is too strong for competitive play if left in a state where it balanced and or strong in pubs. The reason for this primarily comes from the ultra-reliable engage of his Bodyslam , or Bodyslam into ult combos that give guaranteed lockdown with little counterplay. I believe that the only reliable way to balance Gragas is to remove this feature in some way.

But how do we remove such a key feature from Gragas? Naturally just removing it and giving compensation would make him even more clunky than he currently is with his ult, and most players would find trouble playing him as Bodyslam is far less reliable and naturally feels bad for Gragas to do.

After extensive time playing him I have come to the conclusion that the best way to make Gragas able to be balanced is to revert his Bodyslam back to the slow it was in early seasons. This would still keep the bodyslam Flash alive but would remove the toxicity of a guaranteed stun that could potentially destroy a team's formation. Reverting bodyslam would make it so riot could be able to adjust him accordingly without having to worry so much about the factor of his e flash. A little extra is that the old bodyslam had an ad ratio, so this could open up a variety of options for tank gragas players who might want to invest in a steraks gage or AD tank item.

The problem with reverting bodyslam is that Gragas will no longer have such a powerful form of cc, therefore he would need to be compensated. now there would be multiple ways to go about this, but the changes I have in mind try to benefit both the AP gragas community along with Riots seemingly forced mentality of a tank-style gragas jungle. The first would be to reduce the base damage of Gragas W and in exchange give it a "ministun" of sorts. Not one lasting .5 seconds but something around .2-.3 that would just be used to disorient players and fit Gragas' fantasy of a drunken brawler who disorients people. The reduce in base damage does not hurt his jungle that much but will prevent his ap version from being oppressive from the next changes.

The next thing that would be best in my mind is to revert his ult. Now I am not talking about bringing back sniper gragas, but I am talking about the delay. Now that Gragas would no longer have the 1 second stun from his bodyslam, he could have his insta-ult back since there would be counterplay to being flashed upon. Potentially they could revert the ap ratio back to .9 from the current .7 as well, as currently AP gragas' damage relies on the 1 second stun window of w,e,q,r and removing the stun would make it much harder for him to deal damage properly.

Finally, if Riot decided that none of my proposed changes to W or R work, they would need to look into gragas Q since not changing it would mean gragas has 2 slows that can't stack. The only thing I have as an idea would be to revert the slow back to an AS slow, that way ADC would have more counters and gragas would not suffer from his current problem of getting melted by ADCs if he misses e. Also they could make the Q do more upfront damage and scale less, currently it scales 50% in damage and slow, potentially reduce the scaling to 25-33% and put more upfront damage.

Thank you for reading my thoughts.

TL;DR::: Gragas player BTW, Gragas has been in a terrible state for months now. His e flash is too toxic and makes his kit unbalancable. Revert it to the old slow to allow him to be balancable, compensation to help him potentially includes: removing ult delay since no more 0 counterplay stun, revert to old ratio, give W a .2 second ministun to allow him to be a disruptor while nerfing base damage, and changing q back to an AS slow for adc countering and give it higher base damage with lower scaling amounts.