Why Ryze is Both Underpowered and Broken, and How it Can be fixed.
(This post is now also maintained on Reddit, here! I'll try my best to keep up with the responses on either site.)
Ryze, as of patch 5.14, is the worst champion at winning games. Yet he is still regarded as broken. Overall balance of a champion is only loosely related to the health of their kit. Balance revolves around 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 nerf Irelia, ‘nough said). On the other unhealthy end, a champion with debilitating weakness needs strengths that are correspondingly extreme. 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. 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 during his ult it does even more AoE damage and quite a bit of vamp. His damage and durability 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 squishy, since he no longer does good damage while building like a tank. All of these can be healthy elements of his kit. The mana costs dampen Ryze’s early game, and add 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 them 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, and one that few people seem to realize, is that Ryze effectively snares himself with cast times for 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.
Ryze is billed as a late game hypercarry, but this simply isn't true. All hypercarries have some way of mitigating focus, either through extreme range like Kog’Maw, Tristana, and Jinx, or through extreme mobility such as Vayne and Master Yi. Ryze has no such luxury, and as such he falls off once the game begins to revolve around teamfights. This is especially true since they lowered the damage of his most damaging spell in teamfights, his e, by ⅓ in both base and scalings,. In the average game and comp, Ryze hits peak power relative to his opponents once he has finished his RoA and Seraphs.
If he was able to move during some of his spells, similar to syndra, he could have much of his excessive power elsewhere trimmed down. Most importantly, giving him a half second or so of movement per w-q-e-q rotation would allow a similar amount to be trimmed of his snare without affecting his ability to chase or kite. 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.
Ryze also 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 off 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 a different order is useful. When his passive is popped, proper play is identical to having a single button that casts w-q-e-q as they come up, and scripters are beginning to heavily abuse this. Combo’s can be part of a healthy kit, but when there is only one proper option for all circumstance, it simply encourages scripting without adding anything of value. The speed and repetitive nature of his combo, along with the punishment for executing it improperly, is probably the strongest inducement to scripting of any champion in the game right now.
Until Ryze can cast some of his spells while moving, he will be worthless or unhealthy, and most likely both. Letting him move while casting his q and e make him feel like the spellslinger depicted in Riot’s videos, not a 550 range 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 snare 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. This 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. 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.
There are certainly other ways Ryze could be given power in a healthy way Ryze has the lowest mana regen in the game, and 5.14 lowered Ryze’s damage considerably, without adjusting his mana costs accordingly. This has meant that for many of Ryze’s matchups that no matter how much better he plays than his opponent, he is not only unable to kill his opponent during the small window of power of his passive, but runs OOM while doing so. A Ryze who rushed tear will loose to someone who rushed MR, simply because 100% of Ryze’s mana does less than 100% of their hp. Upping Ryze’s regen, or giving him some mechanism to recover it, would allow Ryze to fight extended battles in lane, rather than a binary check of if he has more mana than they have HP.
**Ryze’s snare is a unique, and in my opinion necessary counter to the plethora of mobility champions that have been dominating play for years. Still, the rate that he applies snare combined with its duration is overbearing, and the subject of most frustration against him. **It also is in many ways better against already low mobility champs, as even with chain snaring blinks and dashes can easily BIC through it. Even with a lowered uptime it could maintain this niche by apply knockdown, enabling it to shut down dashes, and/or by making the snare apply instantly, rather than at the end of its .25 second cast time. Between BICing and its cast time, even dashes with significantly shorter range than rune prison will still get to him, and players with good reflexes can dodge it with untargetablity.
This has been a very long post, thank you for your time. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, I’ll try to address them. Cheers!
(This is an update of an earlier post about Ryze during the 5.11 PBE cycle, here)!)
