@Phreak: You have GOT to be kidding me with this.
Ahri already IS squishy. She's one of the frailest champions in the game. Even Annie has an Armor/MR shield. Cassiopeia builds fairly tanky with (RoA/Seraph + Rylai's). The point of the changes is to actually EXPOSE the squishiness. Her W puts her in Equilibrium Strike range. GOOD.
See, here's the thing about Ahri now. She's really mobile. She has medium-speed medium-range skillshots. She also has non-skillshots with very short range. You know what's cool about that? She can skirt around medium range poking with skillshots. She can also use her high mobility to get into close range and put herself at actual risk to land her reliable damage. Sounds like an actual weakness! She's in range of Equilibrium Strike if she wants to do more than poke. And then skillfully use her movement speed buffs and dashes (with long cooldowns after) in order to succeed.
Sounds a hell of a lot better than, "Well, now it's after 6 minutes, her core weakness is gone."
Also, increasing the mana cost of Q DOES affect her early game: If she can't simply spam Q on cooldown for immense sustain and easy wave clear, she's going to have less overall sustain and forced to walk into autoattack range to last hit more often.
Ultimately, it's always tricky dealing with reworks, either small- or large-scale. I'd consider Ahri's total changes now a small-scale rework. Ahri now:
Is much more mobile than before. She's arguably the most mobile mage in the game who can't dash over walls before level 6. Has a medium-range poke pattern as well as a short-range all-in pattern that uses multiple rotations of spells (as opposed to Fizz just REQW'ing you, Ahri Q-R-E-W-R-Q-W-R-W) supported by a lot of mobility to keep her in the fight (as opposed to something like Jax who just tanks you until he gets multiple ulti hits)Ahri no longer: * Hits you with her entire kit from out of your counter-attack range and then dashes away
And of course, any time a champion "no longer" does something, everyone who's attached to it gets really scared, because a specific thing their champion used to do doesn't exist any more. But really, Ahri shouldn't be hitting you with non-skillshots while dodging everything you ever do. If she's hitting you with non-skillshots, you should be able to hit her back. Ahri's power is in getting to choose when those windows are. That's always been the core power of Ahri: Her ability to choose those windows and if she chose wrong, say "Oh crap" and burn her other two Rs backwards.
I know is this quite long, but this is just part of how Phreak justified the Ahri nerfs on PBE (this was taken from Reddit). He thinks Ahri is SO ridiculous and SO safe, while champions like Gnar, Lee Sin and Zed are just laughing their asses off. These three are just as mobile or even more mobile than Ahri, they deal the same/more damage than her, they are RESOURCELESS, and don't even get me started with their build paths and free stats.
I'm sorry, but I just don't understand this kind of reasoning, it is literally, giving me a headache.
, Ahri is MUCH more mobile/safe than Zed could ever get.