Thoughts on AP Gragas mid?

Very strong because of how retarded his base damages are though because of being melee and having outplayable abilities he can be abused by Assassins and Mages. People never expect him to do damage and often trade with him carelessly (not playing around minions to creep block him and/or negate his E) or if they are hit with his combo they don't retaliate even though they have tools to do so (his cooldowns are pretty high during early game).

Much of his power comes from that people are unaware of things he can do but once they know and are learning from their mistakes (or mistakes of others) then matchups are much harder for Grag because his play pattern is exploitable when squishy.

He is good AP mid ONLY against Mages because he is naturally beefy ( high base and scaling HP + scaling MR cuz melee ) and have reliable ( dat E hitbox ) fast combo and sustain + damage reduction.

against AD u will suffer unless u rush at least to back up ur high stats and ur passive + W, this will reduce ur damage a lot but u have nice base damages anyway and u will not feed the AD mid like hell and stay useful to ur team.

overall he is better than most normal Mages mid in a similar way of how are better than them now in that lane.

There's a one trick in challenger that is basically the gragas equivalent of Singed420. Atleast up until plat to diamond ELO, what champion or how you play them will have no bearing on your ability to succeed, only your own skill will. For the record he's the one who basically invented the combo where you throw a barrel, W>E Empowered auto, then ulty them into the barrel on the ground for a really sweet looking one shot. He consistently does that in all of his games so he's constantly in montages.