Riot Can We Talk About Malzahar And His Future?

I know there are a lot of threads out there, mainly due to the new nerfs he will be receiving, and instead of just replying to those I thought it would be better to make a new thread. Hopefully by doing so you can see all the posts and know that these changes are very alarming.

So I just want to start out by saying, I know Malzahar is top-tier right now, this needs to be addressed and I am glad he isn't being left as OP ( I don't like to play OP champions and Malzahar is my favorite champion). The issue is how you are going about it, it looks like you are "Mordekaisering" him, nerfing him out of viability until you can decide what to do with him 10 months later. These are hardcore nerfs! If there are compensation buffs coming, I suppose all this worrying would be for nothing, but I haven't seen anything and I would like to alert you to this issue now so you can resolve it quicker.

So why is this bad? Well you reworked him so he would be healthier, but unfortunately you missed the mark. You solved none of his problems, he is still an uncontrollable hardcore pusher (except he is better at it now) and while he can no longer melt someone he can lock them down with little to no counterplay other than QSS. All this on top of the fact he can now face tank Baron and Dragons with his Voidlings and take objectives even faster. However, his lack of damage is a separate issue on its own, he is suppose to be a DoT mage, not a lock down secondary support type champion. Basically his new identity does not mesh well with me, I liked his old identity, despite his issues, and I was under the impression we wanted to expand on it, not change it to something else.

His low damage and intense pushing power can all be traced down to one single thing: his Passive.

For those reading this who are not exactly sure what his passive is I will just put it below.

Void Shift - INNATE: Malzahar receives Void Shift if he hasn't taken damage nor been affected by crowd control in the last 30 / 18 / 10 / 6 seconds. Damage from minions does not interact with Void Shift.

Void Shift phases out Malzahar, making him immune to crowd control and taking 90% reduced damage, lingering for 1 second after taking damage or blocking a crowd control effect.

It lets him push without care because he can shrug off any poke or ignore a gank. However, due to the fact you can't poke him or CC him, his damage was lowered to compensate so he can't just melt people for free. Now his Passive is being nerfed heavily, which is fine because 1 sec of Spell Immune with 90% spell block is crazy strong. The issue is, like I stated above, his lowered damage and his new Pusher identity was completely reliant on the fact his Passive was so strong. Reducing his Passive from 1 second of spell immune to 0.25 seconds doesn't seem like a huge nerf, but in League the smallest number changes can throw a champions balance completely out of whack. Basically this heavily reduces his ability to make picks, on Live its hard to stop him from ulting because for 1 second he can't be CC'd. With these changes, you literally need to hold off on your CC for a fraction of a second, making the threat of Malzahar ulting very minimal, he already doesn't deal a ton of damage early to mid game.

Now that it is being super nerfed, he will be unable to push (something that he has very little control over once he uses his abilities) and he will deal very little damage. Which obviously will not leave him in a great spot, so of course I recommend compensation buffs. You don't need to "wait and see how this plays out", he will be far too weak and you will need to buff him or just leave him useless. This is just a fact. I really hope you decide to buff him and not make him useless because I've only recently been able to play him more frequently. He was perma-banned and i was so sad, so now that i can play him regularly its a bit disheartening to see he will be made useless. I am just starting to relearn him too so this makes me worried.

Looking forward to feedback, specially from Riot.