Thoughts On Swain's kit.

I will have to be honest, this might sound really negative and I apologize for If it does. Playing around with reworked Swain and his new kit I feel like it just doesn't work all that well. For starter's his W is way too much of a gimmicky skill that doesn't seel to work that much, yes you have a long range skill that provides vision, soul fragments, a slow and damage and... eh....eh... has a delay of 2 seconds that makes it too hard to hit anything even after a snare much less to use it as some form of long range "ganking" and then there is the reduced damage on minions making it unfit for clearing too which is another issue new Swain seems to be struggling with. More or less the skill can be used to "cut off someone's path" or just plain vision granting, for quite a bit of mana.

Going on with his Q, it is nice latter on I guess, but quite horrible on the first levels and in many ways bad for the laning phase. The mana cost drains your mana quickly If you use it a lot (well mana management is a thing so that's not really that much of an issue) but it's farming potential is kinda bad, it can't harass or snipe backline minions because it gets stopped when it hits something and that doesn't die, more or less trading with it early just invites way more damage to yourself than it hurts your opponent.

Then there is the E, it's a peculiar skill and on some ways harder to land than let's say a Morgana snare and in it's own way becomes harder to use on people you fight close which is were you kind of want them latter in the game. On the other hand it's only upside really is that it can go through minions in the lanning phase I suppose but the problem is Swain following up to such a snare with his Q has him to likely move out of minions and be close enough that can trigger some heavy retaliation. Should he be played top trying to trade with a E passive Q he invites retaliation without much he can do about it. On mid lane he invites assassins to retaliate in a similar fashion and is furthermore placing himself in a spot to invite harder cc than his own and possibly higher damage than his own.

His Ultimate and passive seem fine, not something I would complain about.

To summarize he seems to suffer from a weak laning phase, his W feels like it's bordering the unusable and In my personal opinion a reduction of the delay is much too needed.

His E feels conflicting with his Q and thus his latter playstyle which revolves around Q and a fairly close range, his Q basically seems to negate Es main advantage or at least what I consider as the main advantage.

The Q makes for a weak laning phase and feels conflicting with his E(as mentioned above).

Things that would go through my head as fixes would be his W having a shorter more reasonable delay or maybe adding the slow for things inside it before it explodes. His Q having a piercing capacity regardless to work better in lane and not conflict with his E during laning phase.

So that's more or less it, sorry If it sounds too negative/wrong. Cheers.