Varus and Kog'Maw buffs aimed for success in mid lane

Hey, all. As you may have noticed, APCs are slowly catching on and bringing variety in bottom lane. I personally think this is a great thing and an overdue shift which has a lot of potential to keep the meta fresh. However, with bottom lane gradually opening up to non-AD-marksmen picks, we're probably going to see more and more resistance from ADC marksmen players who don't embrace the change. I think that a good way for Riot to help alleviate some of that resistance is with some targeted buffs for struggling marksmen who go mid lane. This will help avoid a perception of a 'mage invasion' by creating more of a bi-directional population exchange between mid and bot. This will allow the meta to continue to improve while showing players who prefer marksmen that their favorite class is not being unjustly persecuted.

Varus currently has a low win rate and pick rate in both mid and bottom lane. He certainly seems to be struggling currently (D- to C- tier on fan sites) so buffing him can be easily justified. When Varus goes to the mid lane, his Q is his bread and butter ability, allowing him to both poke and waveclear. His Q is also a big part of what helps make his gameplay unique among marksmen, making him a more skill-shot focused caster marksman and less of a 'right-clicker'. Mid lane Varus also tends to build either on-hit or lethality, rather than crit. I think that buffs for mid lane should be aimed at emphasizing what makes Varus distinct and therefore should enhance his Q.

I suggest 4 buffs and 2 nerfs to Varus:

1. Change his Q so that its cooldown scales with attack speed. I like the idea of marksmen who have skill-shots as basic attack replacements; having skill shots rather than reliable basic attack DPS allows a champion to afford other strengths in their kit (ie., having low cooldown, long-ranged poke). We do have a couple champions ( ) in the game who have abilities on a cooldown sufficiently low to be considered an basic attack replacement, but are as close as we get to that among marksmen. I think Varus can take that concept all the way. The Q cooldown could also begin when Varus starts drawing back his bow so that he can continually chain between charging and loosing Qs without ever having space for him to basic attack in-between.
2. Allow his Qs to trigger on-hit effects on the first target hit as a modified basic attack. This will allow Varus to continue to make use of on-hit builds now that he will be using basic attacks even less often.
3. Reduce his Q mana cost by 10, so that constantly using Q doesn't drain his mana quite so quickly. He needs some room to function in lane before he can get his manamune.
4. Due to basic attacking less often, Varus' W blight stacking would need adjusting to continue to work. I suggest that both Varus' basic attacks and Q each add blight stacks, and the blight damage triggers automatically at 3 stacks.

These are obviously massive buffs for Varus, and I would say that they would push him into being too strong if granted without any sort of compensation nerfs.

1. To keep him in line and to further emphasize that his Q is intended to be a replacement for basic attacking DPS, Varus should have his base AD very significantly reduced to the same growth coefficient as Ezreal, 2.5.
2. Another reasonable nerf would be to decrease the hitbox size on his Q to allow opponents more room to dodge the constant skill shots.

Kog'Maw is also currently a big weak and underplayed at the moment (D+ to C+ tier on fan sites). When he is played in mid lane, it is usually as either his hybrid or AP off-build. His mid lane was much more popular before a change some time ago to his ultimate that reduced its AP ratio in exchange for missing health scaling. All he should need to bring back his mid lane presence is to buff his ultimate's AP ratio. The missing health scaling could stay or go depending on how much the AP scaling were buffed. Even just a +0.1 AP ratio increase on his ultimate could have a big impact on bringing him back into the game.