Let's Talk Volibear
Under the current meta, junglers with fantastic gap closing/ wall jumping abilities are currently taking over. Lee Sin, Elise, and Kha'Zix are picked quite often in the LCS because of their ability to create impactful decisions on lanes in the early game. Nautilus has a quick grabbing hook, Sejuani and Amumu (to some extent) can both jump walls and keep safe until they hit their power spikes late game. Evelynn, Shaco and Rengar can become invisible. Even Rammus has an incredibly fast powerball to zip between lanes and into enemies.
Volibear has been left somewhat behind because his rolling thunder cannot create that gap closing distance as well as most other junglers. He is a *very *gank heavy jungler, as his clear times are not that great so he really needs to be able to be successful in creating lane pressure early. He doesn't scale all that well as somebody like a Sejuani, Fiddlesticks, Amumu or other late game champs so his power spikes are really early and mid game right now.
I would propose two things to improve his kit. The most important one would be to add a slight increase in his rolling thunder speed or an acceleration increase like Rammus has. You could even offset the damage of the attack to keep from making it too powerful or increase the cooldown like with Vi's Vault Breaker. This would allow him to initiate in teamfights without losing a quarter of his health before he gets there as well as putting him almost on par with other junglers in terms of reaching his ganking target. I feel he drops off pretty hard as an initiator once laning phase is over so it would make him more viable as a late game champ as well.
My second suggestion is a bit trickier.** I propose scaling thunder claws off a small percentage of health instead of AP. **The most efficient current builds of Volibear are as a fighter or tank. For his ultimate to scale off AP is really useless for him because you would need to create items with both AP and attack speed to really utilize the ultimate efficiently. Plus you need to build him tanky just to be alive long enough to use the whole ultimate. It would give his kit direction and help him scale more evenly into his currently weaker late game (his early ultimate would obviously not be as powerful because of his low health, but late game it would really be an asset.)
Building for him is always a bit of a problem currently. His bite from Frenzy scales with Health and AS and his Rolling Thunder needs some sort of movement speed and tenacity to help him from kiting hell. His Majestic Roar also builds off of AP. That means you would need to Build Health, AP, AS, tenacity and MS to fully take advantage of his kit (you would need more item spaces and a boatload of gold to do so). You could argue that Cooldown is important as well because of the long wait for Frenzy and Thunder Claws to come back up. Even so, most people will take BOTRK as his offensive item which builds off AD, making his kit lack any real direction at all.
I feel that he would still have weaknesses after these changes that would be healthy (something that Riot has greatly stressed). You could still kite him, but not quite as badly. He has a horrible time getting to the enemy backline in teamfights without flash. His main damage comes from his frenzy which you can only use once you have a few hits under your belt and it only does damage once somebody is low health in the first place. He still takes hits from ranged opponents in laning phase. He has fairly large cooldowns for his damage spells (frenzy and ultimate.) His jungle clear times would still not be very good. Below average lane push. You'd still have to choose between tanky items, cooldown items, movement items or attack speed items, etc.
P.S. Let's also get a polar bear skin again for Volibear. Too many brown bear skins, not enough Freljord champ themes.
P.P.S. You get a cookie if you read this far, lol
