Morde the low hanging fruit

Let me start by saying that I feel morde is actually a very easy fix. His main issue is not that he is terribly underpowered and in fact the main issue is he is toxic. He has a playstyle that is only fun for one party at any time. You either win and crush or fail and or get jungle camped. He also already has a well defined identity as "pains paladin." He's the slow and inevitable death we all fear, faceless and remorseless. Overall a pretty good champ.

I think many will agree that adding more mobility is not a good fix as well as adding any hard cc. These are part of his key weaknesses of being slow but powerful. But instead you can move some power into his Q. When he uses his Q mark the target with a Spell Vamp and AP AMP making all following attacks to heal him for more. You offset this by taking some of that vamp from his ult and making his E more costly to cast. This places an emphasis on getting into melee range to sustain in lane. Morde players now have to watch a ranged opponents a bit more carefully as they have to put themselves in danger to sustain. Not to mention that we now pay for pushing the lane and instead want to freeze the lane as best we can. We still keep our signature control of lane but we have incentive to now not outright push on all cylinders when we think the jungler is away.

For the morde player this now allows us to stay alive in the thick of teamfights and actually get to combo a few times. Instead of waiting for when we can win our one way trip. This gives us a way to fight a cc heavy comp without outright countering it. It adds some risk and reward around buying our hextech instead of making it a mandatory firstbuy. If you want to have a safe lane where you have to focus on ranged farming you buy your vamp early if you feel safe you can go for that early armguard to help keep assassins in line or go for a lich bane if you're feeling aggressive. This also fixes a frustrating aspect with morde, where you finally catch those evasive carries land everything on them and then ult but because morde has long gaps between getting his cooldowns back loses them and a potion they drank counters the dot he placed. This issue makes ignite for morde mandatory and would be fixed by even having a light damage amp in his kit.

For the enemy this gives them a window to sneak in a bit more damage and potentially kill morde for ranged and evasive assassins. Due to his recovery being melee based. His ult remains his fallback for emergency saves and cleanups. Along with that, making the amp melee based makes his ult less oppressive late game because for him to get the full power out of his ult he will have to land a Q on you or a nearby target.

This fairly simple change to his kit could easily bring him in line as a less toxic champ but still keep the feel, gameplay and overall kit fairly similar. While reducing what makes him frustrating to play and play against. Feel free to chime in on what you think and I would love to talk to you about it!