Riot, you've gutted Malzahar - Malzahar Main

Notice: This post is intended towards Riot members and is very long. You can skip to the last paragraph just to understand why I feel so strongly about this, but it'll probably sound more like rage banter without the context.

Voidling management is the only thing that separates a good malzahar from a bad malzahar. When malzahar was first released, he was hidden op. I spammed him, but it took 1-2 months before people in competitive started to. After the nerfs you guys dealt him, he became good/average but could still be really good if you were good at voidling management. You guys gutted voidling management this patch. You gutted the reward in knowing how to place voidlings and time them to use them to maximum efficiency. You could tell that there were even some professional players that hadn't mastered malzahar to a degree of being able to consistently do this.

Despite my love for a champion, I will never play something that I don't consider to be good. I loved Fizz, but I haven't played a game ever since you guys gutted his E cooldown. I don't need to play a game to know what playing an assassin is like when your primary dodge/mobility spell is on a 10 second cooldown at max level. But Fizz isn't the point. The point is this:

I have never spammed a champion as much as new Malzahar. I've never been able to enjoy playing a champion that much. Normally I can't even play a champion more than 2 games in a row because I need variety. I like variation. I've played just about every mid laner there is (I've played the game since season 1) and I'm not sure if I've ever been able to play a champion with as much variety in playstyle. It may not look it, mainly if you think about how he only has 1 skill shot or skill placement and the rest is point and click, but the variety is all in the voidlings. Seriously, the multiple ways you can use them and the situations where you have to know which way are what make malzahar so much fun. And the payoff of picking correctly is what makes being good at him so rewarding. But not anymore.

Here are what you guys did to gut Malzahar (3 things specifically): 1). Voidlings can no longer reset off of minions. 2). Voidlings no longer gain attack speed once at 3 voidlings. Numbers 1 and 2 are really intertwined for what I'm about to discuss. What a good malzahar player will do in lane is they will spawn a voidling so that it gets a last hit the second the voidling is spawned. If you do it too early, you're doing two bad things: One, you're wasting voidling time and risking the voidling getting killed before it can multiply, and two, you give the enemy time to react and walk out of your very short E range. You have to not only time it will, but your voidling placement has to be spot on. If you place it even slightly over a minion model, it will skip over a minion and be placed in a very inconvenient location. And once that happens, you've basically wasted a 20 second cooldown which happens to be the bulk of your damage. Now, once you've accomplished both the necessary placement and timing, the next thing to do is use Malefic visions on an enemy right away. You now have 2 voidlings and you will have a 3rd respawn once one of the voidlings gets an auto off. At that 3rd voidlings, your 2 current ones attacking the enemy will get an attack speed boost. This is important for your voidlings to have, because malefic visions only lasts for so long and without the attack speed boost your damage will feel weak because A). it determines the respawn rate of voidlings that you can use to keep dealing damage. B). without it, whatever voidlings you have up won't be dealing significant enough damage.

Please notice that this was a fairly long explanation of only ONE of the uses throughout the game of malzahar's voidlings. I'd be writing an essay far longer if you guys wanted to hear me describe all of the uses of voidlings and what you have to do to use them properly. Since the post is already fairly long, I'm going to move onto the next point.

3). Voidlings can no longer execute minions. The problem that made pre-rework malzahar unviable, the reason we never saw him in competitive, was because of his abysmal last hitting. This interaction of voidlings changed that fact in his rework. At long last, malzahar was a champion that you could last hit with consistently enough to be competitively viable. (Notice how the execute added to swain's Q is a big reason why he became competitively viable too).

The bulk of malzahar's damage was never his Q, or his E, or his Ultimate; it was his voidlings. Dyrus himself looked up my profile on league after playing mid against me and straight copied me because he couldn't even understand how I was able to deal so much damage to him. It was because I'm a malzahar player who knows how to manage his voidlings, and I max them 2nd to make the payoff higher.

There is no possible buff that you guys could give malzahar that I would consider fair compensation for these nerfs. Even if he still deals reasonable damage, you have murdered the very variety that has driven me to play this champion to such a degree. For comparison, I have been a die hard kassadin main since season 3, and I racked up more games on Malzahar than Kassadin in under a month (not kassadin games lifetime). Again for reference, I have never enjoyed a champion so much that I have played it for more than 2 consecutive games on multiple occasions. And I've played this game since season 1 through all of the different metas and broken champions (hello silence leblanc and silence kassadin).

I have taken out the time to try and explain the full effect of the changes you guys made. I don't post to the forums that much, and I don't type 1000+ word essays for fun. I feel like the execution damage is almost non-negotiable, but if I had to pick one of the other 2 mechanics that you guys removed, I would choose to keep the respawn on minion attack. To be honest, I'd like to just see these changes reverted all together. I'll believe you guys if you say that the damage will be virutally the same if you do X or Y, but I still don't understand why you went through with these changes. All these changes really did was gut the creativity and variety in playing malzahar. Whatever malzahar emerges from these changes will be a malzahar that only has one playstyle, one method of trading, and one factor determining whether he can be playing in competitive or not (his raw numbers in his abilities).