Some Ideas on Morgana
Balancing Morgana is tricky as she is played both as a solo lane Mage and as a Support. Here are some ideas on how to make the support variant less over bearing and the solo lane mage more viable.
While she is played mostly as a support right now, this largely because the champions that are good match ups for her in solo lanes are not commonly picked (such as Annie and LeBlanc, though I personally have been seeing more of those two lately). If they were to become more common, she would become a strong pick in solo lanes again.
Soul Siphon:
Her passive is fine. With the exception of when support Morgana is alone in lane it does not really help her, but in solo lanes it lets her stay in lane longer.
Dark Binding:
The most important thing is for the visual to match the hit box. Currently it is about twice as large it appears to be on the classic skin. Visual update please? Or at least fix the hit box. Even if it is smaller, it balances itself by becoming easier to sneak through minions.
At max rank it is one of the longest CC's in the game with a 3 second root. It starts at 2 seconds which already puts it close to the duration of some of the longest skill shot CCs such as Ahri's Charm. This duration cannot be reduced without really hurting her solo lane power without changing the rest of her kit; however, depending on how a reduction in duration is balanced it could make her a stronger solo lane pick while making her a weaker support.
Specifically: to have kill potential she must keep and enemy in her Tormented Soil AoE for a large portion of its duration, since it is a major source of damage for her. To do this she must both land her snare and have the stun from her ultimate go off before the enemy can escape Tormented Soil. This can be maintained while reducing the snare duration by making her ultimate take less time to go off and increasing the CC time to her ult (which would be a buff when ult'ing multiple targets) or by adjusting Tormented Soil to deal its damage in less time (and needing less CC time is better if the opponent has Tenacity or other CC duration reduction, which seems like something that will be more common next season).
Remember: a three second CC that has 35% of its duration removed only lasts for 1.95 seconds or less than the rank one duration.
This is one of Morgana's two basic abilities that provide utility and should be one of the first two maxed, so if the damage is being too oppressive then more would need to be moved to Tormented Soil and Soul Shackle.
Tormented Soil:
This is where a lot of Morgana's damage comes from. At full rank it could in theory do more damage than her ultimate, but in practice it never does its full damage because it would require the system to determine them to be missing 100% of their HP for all five seconds.
It does its damage over five seconds. This is why to be a solo lane mage Morgana needs such long CC durations (3 second snare plus a 1.5 second stun from her ultimate). To reduce her CC duration, this ability would need to do its damage in a shorter time frame. This would cause it to be better for zoning and harrass because enemies do not have to stay in it as long, and therefore could be seen as a buff. On the other hand, it is a nerf during all ins because you have less time to get in other damage to maximize the damage from Tormented Soil.
If the damage is compressed into a smaller time frame, additional number tweaks will likely be needed.
Black Shield:
This should be the reason Morgana is picked, whether in a solo lane or as a support. It provides CC immunity, and it is the one thing Morgana brings that no one else does. Riot has said that mages need more variety, and this is what makes Morgana stand out.
In solo lanes it makes her strong against enemies that rely on a combo that can only be preformed infrequently and can be disrupted by a well timed Black Shield (for example, if it is active when LeBlanc casts Symbol of Malice the shield will both absorb the initial damage and the secondary damage debuff will not be applied at all). It is also decent against magic damage heavy enemies, because in return for only blocking magic damage it is stronger than many other shields in both base numbers and AP scaling.
In terms of executing her proper combo, the shield exists to safely get close to enemies for her ultimate and to make it hard to use CC to escape.
As a support, it mostly matters is lanes where the enemy support has a dangerous CC on a high cool down such as Blitzcrank's Rocket Grab. The magic damage absorption is less useful because in standard team compositions there will always be a marksman who will be doing physical damage. On the other hand, the magic damage blocking is nearly always useful because all the typical supports do magic damage with their abilities.
The best way to give Morgana the damage needed to compete in a solo lane without it being over bearing as a support is to encourage her to spend more points on Black Shield early as a support. Since the magic damage shield does not help against a Marksman's auto attacks, Morgana will not have much incentive to put points into Black Shield for shield strength unless the opponent can pop it and still have a CC ability available. The cool down cannot be changed much without creating too large of windows where it is unavailable to be useful in lane or making it have too much up time after lane.
There are two ways to make ranking up in Black Shield attractive. One is to reduce the base value so that a rank one shield will only stop one CC ability before breaking so that if the enemy has more than one ability that needs to be blocked more ranks are needed. This is particularly effective because she cannot rush AP easily to take advantage of any ratio buffs. The other is to make the duration scale with rank. Solo lane Morgana only needs the shield to last long enough to safely get her ultimate off so lower ranks can be given a shorter duration than it currently has, especially if the time to get her stun off was reduced.
Solo lane Morgana only wants to have one rank in Black Shield, and mostly focus on increasing her damage abilities. Since she will be rushing AP, base value nerfs will not really impact her if they are compensated with AP ratio buffs and the reductions are distributed across ranks (if the bases were reduced to 60/120/180/240/300, then buffing the ratio to 80% would result in Black Shield being only slightly stronger at full build and the same strength it would be otherwise provided she has about 100 AP per rank taken). The best way to make her a stronger pick into match ups where Black Shield gives her an advantage over other picks would be to have a way to reduce the cool down that a support cannot take advantage of. For example having the cool down reduce by one second each time she kills a unit. This still leaves room for counter play if the opponent can manage to zone Morgana away from CS while the shield is on cool down.
Soul Shackle:
This ability is fine with her current kit, but would likely require changes to continue functioning. Technically it is stronger the more enemies are nearby (duo lane), but Morgana can only use her snare to ensure a stun on one target.
Currently this ability takes 3 seconds to do full damage and stun an enemy. It is one of the reasons Dark Binding has such a long snare duration, and given the increasing number of champions with mobility abilities the slow is becoming less effective at ensuring the stun as time goes on. Making it better at getting the stun (say increasing the tether range) would make it more punishing for champions without mobility. If the snare from Dark Binding is reduced, then the time needed for the stun needs to also go down.
Reducing the time needed to stun would make the strategy of using Zhonya's Hourglass after activating her ultimate more effective. It would also increase the chance of stunning multiple opponents, though mobility creep does somewhat offset this. One way to deal with both of these is to make the stun take less time the fewer enemy champions are tethered, making it stronger 1v1 like in a solo lane (say take 2 seconds for one target being tethered but take 0.25 seconds longer per additional target). This does add an interesting choice between having a better chance of getting the stun and secondary damage or taking a chance at damaging and stunning more enemies.
I would like to hear what others think about how to make both Support and Mage Morgana work.
