@Riot, Thoughts on Swain?

Lao Fu the Tiger·Jan 20, 2016·2 votes·238 views

Hey everyone! Swain player here, and just wanted some opinions on how you feel Swain is performing since his nerf. Any updates as to future plans/QoL buffs/more nerfs?

We can see on Champion.gg that his win rate took a huge dive in Plat+ ranked queues after the change, but I prefer looking at LoLKing for stats since it gives a more accurate representation of all queues.

In Diamond, he sports lower than a 50% win rate, and in Gold, he's sitting riiiiight around 50%, even for people who have played him extensively.

Considering this is nearly a 4+% drop in win rates, do you think he was hit too hard, or is this how you feel he should be performing?

4 Comments

Earl EulrichJan 20, 20162 votes

the thing is...nerfing him would have been ok, but not the way they did it. They took away his outplay potential in lane and left him with the save harrass - meaning he still can abuse players that don´t know how to face a Swain, but he can´t defend himself anymore vs players that know the matchup, as you really can mostly ignore his w early on now. would have been too easy to nerf his (save) e dmg instead i guess.

Lao Fu the TigerJan 20, 20161 votes

I honestly feel like if they were to nerf W, that's fine, but not cut it in half at rank 1.

Earl EulrichJan 20, 20161 votes

the thing is...his w is 100&dodgeable if he doesn´t outmaneuver you. also it´s all his waveclear. So before the nerfs you could max w second for more waveclear or max q second for better single-target takedown/dps. Now you are pretty much forced to always go w>q. And for inexpereinced players you still can easily bully them out of lane with a rather toxic e->trade->if he starts fighting back q and out repetiton.It´s 100%relaiable and not much many Champs can do about that pattern.

So why wouldn´t you nerf his abilities that don´t offer counterplay in the first place if they think he´s too strong?

Lao Fu the TigerJan 21, 20161 votes

Basically that's my point. Shaving power is one thing, but slicing his only fallback pattern in half seems a bit over the top.