I think it's time to take a deeper look at Rumble

EDIT: TL;DR Rumble has been recieving nerf after nerf for past couple of years with his only saving grace being meta shits and game mechanic revamps like runes or items, I think that he should be finally revisited from the ground up in his own rights.

(Just a heads up, this is going to be a really long post, this is pretty much my 6 years worth of experience with League and Rumble channeled into this one essay, to give you an idea of a theme I'm going for here I just want to get my thoughts out there on everything regarding Rumble's balance and gameplay over the years, I'll try not to sidetrack into stuff outside of the game like skins, promo materials, etc. because I think I've said all that there is to say, and I'm pretty sure every other Rumble enthusiast did. If your only intent is to remind me how broken and unfair Rumble is, don't bother reading, just scroll down, drop your salt, move on.)

I. Introduction

I've been playing League of Legends for around ~6 years now, I've never thought in my life that I'd spend this much time on a game like this (except for TF2 which I've probably been playing for similar amount of time), nor that I'd get this invested in it, even the non-gameplay related stuff. While the community is often displayed as the literal Hell on Earth, I've still managed to meet a lot of great people thanks to it, make some friendships around the world, and stay in touch with my irl friends for longer, while also introduced me to a whole new spectrum of the internet communities, I believe sticking with the community in a way helped me get confident in getting my words out there, even if it was me just rambling about how titled I am or some dumb shitpost I made up in 2 minutes, those were some great 6 years that I'll never regret spending, and I'm pretty sure that if it wasn't for Rumble, I wouldn't get to where I am now.

What attracted me this much to League was how varied and creative it was (and still is) with its character designs, from Day 1 that I've launched the game pretty much all the characters I've encountered never left my memory since then, there's something for everyone, and it just so happened that Rumble stood out to me enough for me to stick around him for much longer than the rest of the cast. After reading all the lore material that there was for Rumble, I could very much see that it's a character that I could relate to in a lot of ways, most important part being the fact that we both are really emotional and hot-headed yet stubborn, and focused on showing what we're worth, kind of "me against the world" approach if you will. I believe this is what made me connect with his character just beside his ability kit (which is also loads of fun to play with), the fact that I could resonate and emphasize with a fictional character was something completely new to me, and thanks to that connection with him, I've pretty much lived the time of my life in the online world.

Sadly, as of late, Rumble did fall out of favour and even despite AP item overhaul just being shipped to live servers, I'm afraid that it's not gonna be enough to bring him back to his former glory days. Now, before we get to the current state of Rumble, let's take a look back into the past, and see what exactly was so great about Rumble's gameplay that attracted me and potentially his other mains.

II. The First Encounter

Now, it'll be a little hard for me to talk exactly about how Rumble was when he was first released because I wasn't playing the game back then, all I got from some rumours I've heard somewhere was that he's been considered by the community as a trash-tier kind of champion that noone should play, but he was actually sleeper op it's just that nobody figured him out just yet. I can however speak for Rumble from Season 2 onwards, back then I guess he was in a similar state, aside from "trash-tier" comments, it's just that he's been often turned off by people because of his ultimate being both hard to hit and team dependant. It might have been me being a completely oblivious silver player back in those days, but I felt like Rumble could very much hold his own ground for really long amounts of time. His Q dealt a lot more damage, his ultimate rather than have all of its damage be a DoT had a burst damage component added to it when it first dropped on the ground and AP items back then allowed Rumble to actually stick in melee ranged fights and duel toe-to-toe in some matchups, most noteably Will of the Ancients was a really good item for Rumble was a very good choice for Rumble to get his first AP spike and some survivability thanks to its spell vamp (keep in mind that Liandry's wasn't in the game until pre-season 3), also Rylai's Crystal Scepter was a much better buy because it gave more health (500 compared to today's 300) and slowing effects used to stack, meaning that Rumble could actually take advantage of it and keep people nearly snared with his fully maxed E.

Another thing worth noting was that tanks weren't that good at laning, since mana/health sustain wasn't as prominent while bruisers needed some extra magic resistance before they could engage on Rumble, meaning that he had a lot more favourable matchups and had a bit easier time in harder matchups, while still retaining his weaknesses (very little mobility, short ranged abilities aside from ultimate, his kit doesn't scale well into late game, can very easily screw up the lane by pushing at wrong times leading to him getting camped by the enemy jungler). However, Rumble's strengths were also very clear and gave him a unique place in the game, one of the very few AP top laners that enabled more flexible teamcomps (with him you can either pick AD mid to balance out AD/AP damage ratios on your team or pick a teamfighting mage to combo with Rumble's ultimate), while he himself was a strong lane bully with safe laning (not always though) that could abuse tanks' weak laning with a very strong mid-game teamfighting potential. So now the question remains, what happened?

III. Bumpy Road Ahead

As mentioned earlier, the now core item on Rumble, Liandry's Torment, wasn't added into the game until Pre-season 3, and while until that point Rumble's itemization wasn't bad, he didn't really have some certain item that could really shine on him and emphasize his strengths further (DoT damage, Tank Busting) like how Deathfire Grasp was for Veigar and Syndra or how Black Cleaver is now for Darius and Urgot. Liandry was that exact item for Rumble, and it really made his win rate and competitive play presence skyrocket, which in turn, lead to some nasty nerfs for both him, and the item. Liandry took the hit first by having its AP reduced from 70 to 50 over the course of few patches, and while it technically got compensated with HP going from 200 to 300 and passive damage going from 1.66% to 2% of current health per second it still certainly was a hit to Liandry's users (especially since as of those days Rabadon's Deathcap was a very popular purchase as a fourth/third, even second item in some cases, Liandry was kinda bringing down Rabadon's AP multiplication passive).

Liandry changes pretty much ended as of patch 3.02 and aside from bugfixes/misc changes it wasn't changed since then until Season 5, it was however Rumble's turn to take the hit. First up, initial damage on his ult was completely gone, while it was a very strong component to it, the big factor of it was that it took away some of Rumble's much needed self-sufficiency to effectively bully his matchups and win the lane. Shortly after, his Q and E also took quite big nerfs with Q being a much worse ability when not in Danger Zone and E being completely attrocious to use when at rank 1. Both of these changes, while reasonable when regarding Rumble's play pattern when fighting enemy champions (emphasis on Danger Zone being Rumble's meaningful powerspike, bridge the gap between more experienced Rumble players and those that are not as good) his laning phase has become a lot harder to manage even by the veteran Rumble players. One thing that's worth bringing up here is that Rumble, just like today, had an awful autoattack animation, so he oftentimes was forced to last hit with his abilities, however, his Q also had a 50% damage reduction against minions, so despite having a strong position in lane, Rumble often found himself getting out cs'd by his opponent because of these issues, reduced damage on Q and E made last hitting on Rumble even harder than it already was. To make the matters even worse, few patches forward, Spectre's Cowl is added into the game, an item which seemingly was strictly designed to counter Rumble during the laning phase, providing quite a bit of defensive stats (on release it was 200 HP, 45 MR and the same passive as today). This was one of the first major factors that reduced Rumble's capability to beat tanks in lane, but while it wasn't absolutely destructive, it did start sort of a trend, which will come into play later.

Despite these problems arising, Rumble was still a very much playable and viable champion, it's just that the amount of things that he could do has been severly limited, while the thing that he's capable of that stayed became a bit harder to pull-off, therefore once again turning off entry-level players from picking him up. Few months forward, Season 4 comes along with its Renekton Bar (for those who don't know, Renekton in Season 4 was so strong that viability of top laners was measured by how well they could do against Renekton, hence the "Renekton Bar" which later on evolved into top lane Trifecta of Renekton, Shyvana and Mundo), and Smite/TP strategies, both of which don't favour Rumble as much, but again, he still had the advantage of range over other top laners and could play very passively while scaling into mid-game teamfights. He even got a few buffs like bumping up values on Danger Zone W and E or fixing a ton of bugs that disrupted Rumble's flow.

Fast Forward to Season 5, Rumble is becoming a contested pick once again! With the top lane meta shifting towards tanks/weak early game champs (Maokai, Gnar) both of which Rumble could beat, jungle meta also favouring tanks (again, champions that Rumble can beat), games becoming more about deathball mid-game teamfights and Liandry's buff (AP going from 50 to 80) Rumble could flourish once again as a champion, he still had his glaring problems of having a lot of focus put on wave management, heat management, enemy champions having access to item that counters Rumble before he gets his item spike... it does sound like a lot, but Rumble's strengths shining in the meta, also with the emphasis on how important tp ganks are (which allowed Rumble to force teamfights even earlier and gain an immense advantage) did offset that and allowed him to become a strong, yet hard to master and (imo) fair. But Rumble's American Dream was soon to be snuffed out by one patch that I'm sure noone who's been playing at that time would ever forget.

IV. 5.16

While this patch has been talked to death on how terrible it was, and how unfortunate the timing was for it (Worlds were just around the corner after all) I believe it's still worth talking about it but here, rather than just beat the dead horse around that is Mordekaiser rework, let's focus more of the bigger spectrum of this patch, which is Juggernaut Patch coupled with a few changes from around that period, first up, patch 5.13 had its own AP itemization overhaul, but to be completely honest I think it did more harm than good. It did make some components easier to get early on but at the price of their reduced effectiveness (Needlessly Large Rod) while almost every full AP item had its cost go up, 100 gold here, 200 gold there, 300 gold there, full AP item builds overall became a bit more expensive while Deathcap also got its (now gone) obnoxious build path (and was later nerfed again in patch 5.22 where it had its combine cost increased by 300 gold), which in turn made Rumble's full build a bit harder to reach while not really getting that much in return. Also around Season 5, slowing effects were nerfed so that overlapping slows wouldn't stack (only the highest slow value applies) meaning that Rylai also became a bit worse of a purchase for Rumble, limiting his item choices to just Liandry, Zhonya and Void Staff every game with build order changing depending on how ahead you were. And let's not forget that Rumble is still doing terrible at farming, so making his core items back then even a little bit more expensive could break him.

After the cost of AP items has been increased, Rumble himself got nerfed in 5.16 with his ultimate getting a huge cooldown increase at all levels (Rumble has been historically known as a champion who at most would build 10-20% cdr because of how his kit works, but back then all he could afford was 5% cdr from masteries, meaning that these nerfs were a lot more crippling that if they were applied to any other champion in the game) and its range effectively nerfed by a small amount (because of the rocket trail now starting behind the cast point while still having the same length). Couple that with pretty much all Magic Resistance items becoming cheaper, Rumble's biggest threats becoming meta picks (Juggernauts and Divers have become much better picks and with all the item changes, they also had a much easier time dealing with Rumble) and you have a recipe for disaster.

And this is where I will bring up the situation from Season 3, where Rumble become a favourable pick thanks to the meta, the changes have been always composed of these 3 factors: Items that Rumble uses get nerfed, Rumble himself gets nerfed, his counters become stronger. The difference being that here it's been a much faster and much harsher process, which later on lead to leave its mark on Rumble in pre-season 6, which was an even more crippling experience for Rumble players, Haunting Guise got its price increased, again, magic resistance items had their costs reduced, again, Darius and Fiora still remain as viable options in the top lane, Tanks or Champions who could abuse Sunfire/Iceborn fiasco also slowly start to climb their way up in top lane tier lists (Tahm, Ekko, Fizz, Maokai, Poppy), and also ADCs start gaining a lot of power through faster, cheaper and more meaningful power spikes, while all the compensation buffs Rumble gets is measly a 50 range increase on Q, updated tick rate on Q from 0.5 to 0.25 and a smaller collision size. I understand meta shifts and all that jazz but that was just ridiculous, so ridiculous that Rumble for about 10 patches has had the lowest win rate out of all top laners in the entire game, some sites even displaying that he had lower winrate than unconventional/trolly picks like Nunu or Warwick (pre-rework) top while maintaining a <1% pick rate.

Saving grace for Rumble around that time was the fact that he started seeing play in the jungle due to how effectively he could clear it with the newly added Hunter's Talisman, but it still didn't change the fact that his overly prominent flaws started to show, he has fallen behind a lot of champions in dueling, his 1v1 capabilities became weaker, he has become much more dependant on his ultimate, and it was very easy to itemize against him and just run him over through his ult without taking much damage. As few pro players liked to describe it "Sure you can farm quickly and gank with your ult but you're still playing Rumble".

V. A glimmer of hope that turned out to be a train running you over

After all the nonsense that was the dreadful period of 5.16-6.7 the game started to stabilize, Sunfire/Iceborn combination has been nerfed, Grasp of the Undying was rebalanced, some of the out of the line champions were nerfed and Rumble got two pretty meaningful buffs to his kit, Q now dealt full damage to minions, and R had its cooldown decreased at all ranks. And with the following Mage Overhaul in 6.9, where we've seen nerfs to Magic Resistance items, and addition of Hextech Protobelt and CDR on Zhonya's, gave Rumble meaningful CDR options to include in his kit. While it certainly made him feel better to play, you could feel that the progressive game changes/Rumble nerfs from the past left quite a big mark on him. While he still retained his safe laning and mid-game teamfighting, his lane bully identity started to fade away with champions either being equipped with kits that could ruin Rumble's day or items countering Rumble still being very relevant and meaningful purchases. But, Rumble was still being played with some success, although couldn't compare to Jayce or Kennen who were S-tier top laners as of that time.

After Worlds, we move into Pre-season 7 and while not as harmful as it was last season, Rumble still did move down quite a bit in the food chain. Courage of the Colossus replaced Strength of the Ages (effectively nerfing farming junglers like Rumble and buffing tanks), Assassin reworks came along, and while the Assassins themselves were bearable, Lethality was an incredibly annoying stat to deal with, given that it was abused by ADCs who once again gained a high amount of relevancy and started mercilessly killing everyone and taking over lanes other than bot lane. That did get hotfixed rather quickly and wasn't as painful as previous similar experiences. Rumble even got to experience some relevancy in Mid-Season where he was put alongside Gragas and Galio as the a highly contested pick thanks to his waveclear. What did make Season 7 annoying for Rumble though, was later stages of the season when items like Redemption, Ardent Censer and Locket of Iron Solari started becoming more popular, Champions that either already countered Rumble (Galio being probably the biggest offender) or those who were losing to him got stronger either through direct changes or item/gameflow changes, like more and more focus being put on ADCs, them scaling a lot faster than any other class in the game and the introduction of Adaptive Helm and reworked Doran's Shield, on top of it all when Adaptive Helm and Doran's Shield were apparently not enough, Rumble himself got nerfed quite harshly technically he did get compensation buffs in the form of extra W shield amount/E damage, but these changes still couldn't outweigh the significance that his Q nerf had, by nerfing its cooldown in the early game by nearly double of its amount, Rumble slowly started losing ground in the laning phase and couldn't afford more riskier, bully playstyle (quite ironically, while he and Galio both shared this strength of having a very strong waveclear early game, Galio took much longer to recieve a meaningful nerf, despite being overall stronger than Rumble in all the fields they shared), while his mid-game teamfighting power was heavily disrupted thanks to Redemption and Locket completely negating his teamfight presence.

Again, the same pattern that could be noticed in earlier instances of Rumble being a fairly strong (though here miraculously we managed to avoid AP item nerfs): Magic Resistance items saw a buff, so did Rumble counters, while Rumble himself got nerfed, all three of these happening in a very short time span. All of these changes continued to grind Rumble into dust and keep him out of relevancy unless he somehow managed to snowball the lane, but it has become much harder when his only redeeming qualities (lane bullying, mid-game teamfights) took a huge hit. Rumble had to wait for yet another Preseason to see if this time he'll get some of his old groove back, and honestly, from all the sneak peeks of Runes Reforged I had high hopes that he would.

All the Preseason 8 changes seemed like Rumble was finally coming back into shape, Arcane Comet/Aery both being excellent keystones to emphasize his DPS nature and giving him back some lane presence, even lesser runes like Ultimate Hat, Scorch, Celerity, Perfect Timing, Future's Market, all this and more really showed promise for Rumble and that coupled with the fact that all of the Champions would lose some of their starting Magic Resistance, it seemed like the little hot-headed punk would come back wrecking faces once more. But sadly, the reality check on that one hit me way harder than it should. Despite the biggest offenders of poke strategies involving Sorcery tree being only few selected champions (Teemo, Jayce, Camille, and recently Sion) instead of bringing them in line, whole Sorcery tree got shafted, AP it grants, Scorch damage, Celerity MS, Aery damage, all took hits while indirectly nerfing Rumble and leaving him with nothing to really emphasize his early game strengths (if any were left from all the beating he took over the last few years), later on Perfect Timing (still deservedly) gets nerfed, making another choice Rumble preffers feel underwhelming, and this leaves Rumble in the lane where his opponents either crush him with their superior harass (Sion, Camille, Gangplank) or just straight up brush his damage off without much effort and outscale him just because a certain minute mark passed (Gangplank, Gnar, Nasus). Even in mid-game teamfights, Rumble is still heavily outshined by ADCs who scale much faster and higher than him, are more self-sufficient than yet still get an additional set of abilities in form of their support following them around and get to also scale into late game where Rumble falls flat on his face and is no longer relevant to the game aside from his ultimate that doesn't even do that much on its own. And as much as I wanted to believe that AP item overhaul is going to change something about this state of Rumble and maybe give him an edge over other champions, that is simply not the case. Rumble has been slowly dying over the last several years and nothing's been done about it.

VI. What does the future hold for the little guy?

While all this ranting may have left a rather bittersweet taste, I'm still an optimistic person, I want to believe that Rumble will get better, I want to believe that Rumble will come back to his Season 2-3 glory days, even in spite of all those ridiculous changes that he's been met with, I still believe that Riot will figure this stuff out, but seeing how nobody ever brings attention to Rumble because he's never the main topic of any conversation, he doesn't have the gigantic playerbase backing him up like Lee Sin and Ahri, neither does he have the meme-factor that Volibear has, sure some pro players and coaches talk about him from time to time but it usually resorts to "yeah um Rumble is great if you hit his ult and all but he has problems" that's it, end of story, nothing, nobody bothers to talk about what Rumble's problems actually are nor what he needs to fix them.

Now, I don't want to seem like some sort of egotistical reddit shmuck who knows everything about the game and will therefore present you the exact number/mechanic changes that Rumble should recieve in order to help him in the long term like "oh +50 damage on this ability, make his ult deal true damage, blahblahblah". I'll simply present the points about Rumble's problems and what conclusions can we draw from them:

VI. a) Rumble's lows are too low, Rumble's highs are not high enough

The progressive cost reductions of Magic Resistance items/cost increases of AP items have left Rumble in the state where if he loses the lane and make up the difference in gold, he will be left as a dead weight to the team, whereas if he does come out successful and builds his items, before he gets them his opponents will already have proper items to counter him not allowing Rumble to express his powerspikes in a meaningful way. I think that Rumble could be tinkered with to give him either some further multiplication to his item synergy, or simply something that allows him to stay relevant without having to spend ridiculous amounts of gold over his laning opponent.

VI. b) Rumble was too strong as both lane bully and a teamfighting menace, but now he can't do either

This in a way connects to the previous point, but it shows it from a different perspective, Rumble in the older days was kind of a precursor of Azir, though not as ridiculous. He could have both strong and safe laning phase, while scaling into mid-game teamfights allowing him to close out the game efficiently with this initial lead. But with the constant buffs to Magic Resistance itemization, introduction of 3 new items strictly designed to screw over battle mages (reworked Doran's Shield, Spectre's Cowl, Adaptive Helm), buffs to Rumble's counters, introduction of lots of new champions/champion reworks that can effortlessly beat Rumble or do his job better, nerfs to both laning side of Rumble and his teamfighting nature are simply too much to handle. The only solution I can see here is if Rumble recieves a clear direction in which balance team wants to take him, and build him purely around that, while of course still not making him completely unplayable in other areas since a lot of champions have become very flexible as of lately.

VI. c) Rumble has little to no self-sufficiency

This is possible the biggest factor as to why so little people play Rumble, why is his playerbase composed mostly of dedicated one-tricks and veterans and why his soloq performance is almost always below average. Rumble has simply too much focus put on his ultimate, but at the same time, this ultimate without days, months, years even of practice is near impossible to use effectively, unless you play in a coordinated team with a very specific team comp, nowadays it doesn't feel like your team builds a comp around Rumble being a strong champion, but you pick Rumble because you see that your teamcomp that formed so far is enough to handicap your ultimates. And as far as Rumble's base kit goes, he has both too short ranges and takes too long to kill a single person without additional support of his teammates, but if you look at other battle mages, Azir can very well stand his own ground, staying with his team is an option to him, Taliyah can very easily kill people with her combo on her own, staying with her team is an option to her, Karthus can suicide dive enemy team and even pick up a kill or two from that, staying with his team is an option to him, if Rumble tries to solo kill someone past a certain point he'll not only have to stay within enemy's ability ranges, exposing himself to enormous risk, but also he won't kill them quickly enough, nor is he tanky enough, nor does he have enough crowd control to do much after that. Sure, different champion are meant to do different things, but that doesn't justify Rumble being reduced to the role of an ult bot. People were outraged when Elise was downgraded to a stun bot with no qualities beyond that, why did she cause an uproar in community and Rumble didn't if it's essentially the same case? What I'd like to see is letting Rumble play around with his base kit and pose an actual threat with it past the laning phase, even at the cost of his ultimate getting nerfed.

VI. d) Rumble is put under radar only when he's too strong, when he's too weak he's completely ignored

This is another point that has been recurring quite a lot here but it's worth to mention it one more time, I believe that not enough focus is being put on Rumble, his performance when he's weak is being completely neglected and he's left to rot until some miraculous meta shift happens, but when such occassion arises, Rumble is very quickly put down and left weakened again. When you think about it, it's all because while Rumble recieved a lot of nerfs in the past, sure, not as much as some other champions, he rarely ever recieves buffs, and if he does they usually don't do enough to bring him into a favourable state. And while we're at it, the nerfs to Rumble usually come in oversaturated barrages of ton of new stuff popping up with seemingly sole intent to kick Rumble out of the game, whereas when he's being buffed, it's either small QoL changes or buffs to his weakest abilities that don't hold any relevancy in the long term. Here I believe all it takes is to keep better watch of Rumble's performance when such massive changes happen and act accordingly, because sometimes having direct nerfs, Adaptive Helm, Redemption, Locket, Censer and Galio drop on your face all at the same time is way too much.

VII. Conclusion

You've probably gotten the impression that I'm some sort of a crazed Rumble fanboy, and well, you could definitely call me that. I just can't get enough of this little dude, pretty much everything about him speaks to me, there's not only the drive to play him more because of how I still manage to like his kit despite all those changes dropping time and time again, and I don't think that he deserves the reputation nor the treatment that both the community and Riot give him. It's still a very fun champion that you can pick up nowadays, have some success and realize "holy shit how did I not try him earlier" though that could be applied to any other unpopular champion. League of Legends has an entire cast of various wacky, crazy characters and all around misfits that you wouldn't see anywhere else, that's what this makes this game more special to me.

But I digress, the point is that I think that just leaving champions to die so that they can be deleted and rereleased as new champions isn't always the way to go, and I don't want this to happen to Rumble. So please Riot, I want you to take a closer look at Rumble, and even if you don't respond to me directly, show me a sign that you still care for him.