6.4 is the nail in the coffin for GP.

I feel like Riot thinks that GP's windows of vulnerability just aren't large enough with how many barrels he can store. And I honestly kinda agree. Is GP being about to pull off 3 barrel combos in a single teamfight really reasonable? Should barrel chains really be used as a poke tool? Because that's how they're being used now. I, and most GP's, simply fish for barrel crits on the enemy team over and over and immediately ult and engage if we land even 1 barrel crit on an enemy squishy. At this point, using barrel combos doesn't really require commitment once you have 40% CDR and Riot likely sees that as a problem. Lowering the carrying capacity to 3 might be too much and I wouldn't be surprised if the limit was raised to 4 if GP's winrate tanks hard enough. I also wouldn't be surprised if they lowered the recharge timer more. But the idea behind the change is sound and honestly needed.

Really, I always thought the biggest problem with the barrels was that they just did so much. AoE auto-attacks/Q that do bonus damage AND ignore armor AND slow AND give him a speed boost. Surely they could give him some power back elsewhere and remove one or two of those things?

16 seconds or more is what you wait for getting your barrel detonated (which isn't hard) since rarely do you use just one barrel in a teamfight. I honestly do not even want to play GP anymore after this change (he's 4th highest mastery at like 30 something thousand) since I will just get pissed off when they have a champion with a good AA animation kick me out of a fight for right clicking my barrel while my Q is in mid air (yay 2 abilities on cd). At least on live it's nbd and I have 2 more barrels to try again with, but now I will be basically out of the teamfight for 16 seconds because of ONE auto attack going through.

Giving the Barrels a mana cost, upping the recharge rate, anything besides this because some champions you will NEVER be able to barrel now. Try to hit a Jinx in Pow-Pow with a Barrel. Spoilers: it won't happen. You can shoot before it hits 1 hp and she shoots right when it hits 1 hp and your barrel goes bye-bye because travel times.

The damage wouldn't be an issue if there were windows in which you could punish him. Other champs have to wait for cooldowns on their big burst abilities, Gangplank get about three tries in a fight before he has a meaningful cooldown and that's just a tad ridiculous.

That's what I meant when I said competative.

Also people who are downvoting me, I play GP (or at least did, haven't in a while) and I don't want him nerfed either