Riot, Can We Talk About Bard Being a 'Catcher'?

For the longest was always a champion that straddled the line between being a Mage and a Catcher. Somewhere between and is a pretty close approximation to his overall playstyle. Though It seems like the past year or so you've incrementally chipped away at the more durable Catcher side of his kit and pushed him further and further towards either a burst mage or an incredibly meek support-item bot. There's nothing wrong with those playstyles, but there are other champions who strictly do those better and more enjoyably: pure mages and enchanters. The benefits of Bard is that he's always been a fringe case that could feasibly build towards raw damage, passive support item dude, or catcher/offtank playstyles as needed. The downside? His high skill cap- it's relatively easy to feed with and easy to totally whiff on his abilities.

That said, I feel like you've overloaded him quite heavily towards damage and directly away from the catcher/offtank so many of use love. It's to the point that if I ever complain about Bard in games the retort is always "But his early game Electrocute burst is so strong!" which while 100% true, isn't why many of us began playing him three years ago!

A few brief things that seem to be impacting this over the past 12-18 months:

• His meep damage has been directly buffed.
• Runes Reforged hit, removing the ability to stack Armor runes. (I'm aware there was a slight armor compensation to all champs, but it's still a significant net loss for anyone who went hard on defensive runes)
• The Electrocute keystone is drastically superior to all other choices. Grasp and Klepto are both conceptually super appealing for him, but he's too squishy to reliably be trading that often.
• Damage runes are generally much stronger than defensive ones causing a general bias towards damage builds in the broader game.
• Tank items got nerfed across the board, heavily gating tankiness on a support's gold income.

Considering the above, would you consider giving our friend a mild damage nerf and defensive buff? Nerf the base damage of Meeps and Q slightly, leaving the AP ratio intact for folks who want to build damage. Tack on a modest amount of scaling Health/Armor/MR so he has a little more viability wading into those mid/lategame teamfights to line up those sweet Q stuns to play that flanking catcher many of us love!

Also, in light of the recent mana changes a reduction to his W's mana cost would be very welcome. Yeah, it's a bad heal and I think we're okay with that if it didn't cost so much.

Ootay?