I believe the balance team wants to be confident he's not still too strong for top end players before tweaking him into a better spot. As someone with a personal investment in Ryze due to having worked on him, I would like to take that look before worlds, because I think he brings some different stuff to top lane (carry top, magic damage, anti-mobility), but even I am not 100% confident the guy is super weak despite a LOT of the data seeming to suggest it. However, data also suggests that with player experience, he's actually not all that weak. I know a lot of people think he's a brainless no-skill champ, but the data doesn't actually seem to reflect that.
One of the things I did when working on Ryze was I tried to go really hard on his strengths and weakness, namely his in-passive versus out-of-passive states. I've received a lot of criticism for that, and some of it's probably well-deserved. Anyone active on the boards a few months ago probably saw threads like "What idiot at Riot thought chain root was a good idea?" Well, it was mostly me. With Ryze's update, I was taking a really large amount of his consistent power away, and the high uptime on Rune Prison during his passive was something I gave back in return. The main problem I did not anticipate was that W max could be a thing, and so I addressed that, but when I did that nerf, I buffed his Q at the same time since he otherwise seemed weak. It turns out he was still strong without W max, and so he remained a balance problem.
To be completely honest, I'm not 100% sure if he's balanced or weak now (I have a hard time thinking he's too strong, but who knows...). I'll probably talk to the balance team about him in the coming weeks before worlds to at least get a solid evaluation, so maybe we'll see something then. Feel free to ask for an update then. I might have something more definitive to say.
