Why Ryze is broken and how it can be fixed

This post has been updated for 5.14 here!

First off, I love Ryze’s rework. I’ve netted well over 300 games of Ryze since his rework in april, and as soon as I read the 5.10 patch notes I started jungling him in ranked, getting about 60 games in with him before the pro scene figured out how easy it was to serve a 6 second life sentence to rune prison.

Once upon a time this kind of abusable mechanic was called toxic; now that term seems to be reserved for members of the community, and is instead referred to as no counterplay(™) (or a variety of expletives). Never the less, as Riot Repertoir notes, Ryze hasn't been doing that good of a job at winning games despite how brutal he seems. Even with clip after clip of Ryze “plays” coming from LCS the last couple weeks, he’s only won 5 out of 8 games, other champions have managed higher ban rates and/or win rates. This is why Riot cant simply nerf his snare; doing so would trash him altogether. Champion balance revolves making a champion's strengths minus their weakness on par with the rest of the champion pool. A champion that has few weakness needs to have few strengths (better nurf Irelia, ‘nough said). On the other unhealthy extreme, a champion that has debilitating weakness needs to have broken strengths. This is Ryze, and** until his weakness change, he needs strengths in his kit far more overloaded than his targeted q ever was in order to be balanced (this is where he is now)**. Let me explain.

Ryze’s strength is extremely obvious: while his passive is up he spams his rotation, w-q-e-q, every 2 seconds minus CDR. This does tons of damage(™), allows him to chain snares, and with his ult does even more AoE damage as well as quite a bit of vamp. His damage and durability also scales with mana, but it’s pretty minimal compared to the ap and defensive stats his items gives. Its enough to make RoA and Seraphs core items, but nothing more than that.

Some of Ryze’s weakness are obvious, other less so. On the obvious side, his mana costs are high relative to his damage, he is extremely dependant on his passive to be effective, and of course he has all the issues the come from being a short range mage, now that he can no longer do good damage while building like a tank. All of these are healthy part of his kit. The mana costs dampen Ryze’s early game without crippling it, and adds a good amount of play and counterplay on how the player utilizes that mana. The passive adds windows of opportunity to play around him, both in lane and in teamfights. Ryze needs to think carefully about his stacks, as they determine when he can engage, and when he can be engage. The timer adds a sense of desperation while playing him, as you need to capitalize on the stacks or lose them, setting yourself to be engaged on in turn. As far as being a short range mage, Ryze couldn't be anything else.

Ryze’s greatest weakness, one that few people seem to realize, is that Ryze effectively snares himself with cast times for over 1 second on every spell rotation he does. Auto attacks can always be canceled to dodge incoming skills, Ryze’s spells can not. Spamming his spells locks him down, and this is only balanced by the fact that if he capitalizes on his passive right he can snare a tenacity free enemy even longer in a 1 v 1, out DPS most champions that have long enough range to keep attacking him while snared, and do enough AoE burst in a teamfight that his team still wins it after he gets inevitabley cc’d from the skill he can’t dodge and obliterated.

If Riot let him keep moving during some of his spells, similar to syndra, they could tone down a lot of his excessive power elsewhere. Its infuriating to be unable to move while playing against Ryze, but it's just as infuriating to be unable to move to dodge that Blitz hook or Cassiopeia ult while playing him, and requires an unhealthy amount of compensation elsewhere.

Another weakness of Ryze is that he only has one combo: w-q-e-q. You can lead with it wherever you like on that chain, such as q-e-q-w-q-e-q, but once you cast his w, you need to cast q-e-q to reduce the W cd to 2 seconds overall, minus cdr, then repeat w-q-e-q. If you mess it up, such as casting w-e-q all three spells will be on cd, and you will waste 3 seconds (minus cdr) of your valuable passive for his e to be back of cd. This usually gets you killed and/or lets a kill get away. This doesn't even add counterplay, as there is no indication Ryze suddenly lost his ability to spam. After 300 games I still sometimes mess this up, as do the pros, all while a scripter could write a code to execute it flawlessly every time in a few minutes. This mechanic simply lowers the skill floor for Ryze without adding anything to his play, as there is no context where you would use a different order. When his passive is popped, he might as well just have a single button that casts w-q-e-q as they come up, and I’d bet some scripter has already made that a reality.

Ryze’s W, despite saying it snares instantly, doesn't actually snare until you finish the animation, which is about .25 seconds after you cast it. Annoyingly, this means the spell fails if you lose vision, such as when they turn a corner or enter a bush. You still finish the animation, wasting your time, but it doesn't go on CD or cost mana.

The current iteration of PBE moves in the right direction. He now continues his previous order after finishing his cast animation, so you don’t have to move your mouse cursor off your target and right click after every spell to try to kite. His snare is now better at level one but scales much worse (80 damage with 1 second snare level 1 to 160 damage and 1.4 second level 5, from 65 damage and .75 second snare to 185 damage and 1.75 second snare) making it not worth while to max first, and his passive is now 2.5 seconds, scaling to 5 seconds as you level your q. His q now gets more damage per level, always cost 40 mana, but has 5 less level 1 damage. There is still only one valid skill to max first, but it is q now instead of w. They also removed the .25 second minimum delay on his spell refresh, but that was effectively moot in 5.10 when they made it occur at the start of the spell cast, as all his spells had a roughly .25 second cast time. - I've been corrected, they upped his delay to about .4 seconds in 5.10, although its back to 5.8 style on live

Until Ryze can cast some of his spells while moving, he will either be worthless or unhealthy. Letting him move while casting his q and e make him feel like the spellslinger depicted in Riot’s videos, not a 550 range (Well, 600 center to center) pre-rework Xerath on urf, it would make the MS on his ult feel meaningful for more than getting in range, and it would let his damage be toned down without gutting him. I do feel like keeping the casting time on Rune Prison, perhaps even increasing it to .35-.4 seconds, would be both thematically and tactically appropriate. Rune Prison has a very distinct casting animation while q and e are indistinguishable, and making the prison appear at the start of the spell rather than the end would further improve clarity(™). Doing this would add a lot of play and counterplay around Rune Prison, as it would signal to the enemy team when Ryze couldn't dodge skill shots, and make Ryze think twice about when to use his snare. Letting his E scale with levels down to 5 or 5.25 seconds, long enough that he can’t q-e-q-e non stop as in the first two re-reworks on PBE, but short enough to not be screwed entirely when he cast in an order other than w-q-e-q would make Ryze much more forgiving, and if implemented with the the suggestion above would let him q-e-q-e as a low-risk but low-damage alternative to w-q-e-q.

On an related note, adding some automatic save feature to the form post form would be much appreciated, as I wrote this all out about a week ago only to click back and erase it all.

I also posted this on the PBE forums, here.

Thank you for your time, this was one hell of a post. I'll try to respond to any questions people ask.