Swain's Changes in 6.9- Why the changes create the potential for a much healthier swain.

Disclaimer: Contains spelling and grammatical errors. I wrote this at 3 AM and I am going to sleep now.

I don't want this to be drawn out but let me just start this post by saying that I have been a swain main since season 2. I have been ~platinum 2 level on swain since season 3. I have spent a large amount of time analyzing the optimal build paths, runes and masteries to take on swain. I have gone so far as to create an excel document to compare the damages of an athenes/void staff build vs an abyssal/deathcap build back in season 5.
After play-testing swain, I will go over the changes and how I think they impact his balance and, more importantly, how it feels to play him.

Q: Before patch 6.9 I went into a custom game with my friend to test out the consistency of swain's q. Pre 6.9 their were 3 ticks on his q. The first tick is always gaurenteed to hit, because it hit instantly with no cast time. The second tick hit over 80 percent of the time at max range when they were running away. It was possible to dash out before the second tick, however. If they were in melee, the second tick always hit. The third tick would hit about 25 percent of the time if they began running when I pressed 1. If you are kiting against a melee champion, the third tick would always proc, or they would disengage. That is the benefit with the old q, against melee champions the tether was centered on swain. They had to disengage, and it caused the same lane dynamic as ryze and vladamir to a lesser extent when you play top lane, where you are able to kite them. The old q proced the first tick instantly, and to it was very helpful for csing when you need to hit 2 minions at once.

   The new q brings more counter-play in the sense that it is not targeted and all of the damage can be avoided if they dash while you are in the Q animation.  Which brings me to my first gripe, that it has an animation.

     The best plays on swain you could possibly make are when you are 1v3ing and they are all focusing you while you kite them while expertly dodging every skill-shot and slowing them down with q while running away and then hitting all 3 in your snare and then draining them down with your ulti.   Syndra is very satisfying to play because she has no ability animation on either her q or w, giving her the edge against other skill shot mids like lux.  A great swain has learned the fine art of dodging skillshots and strafing, and having an animation makes playing swain less fufilling and satisfying.  Does having an ability animation give more counter-play against swain?  Does it make it more satisfying to play against swain?  Riot needs to ask themselfes what the priority is when they design champions, do we want to make the player feel like they are in control, or do we want to make the controls feel clunky with large delays?

 Anyways, back on track.  The idea of sending Beatrice out to kill everyone in the area is a really great idea, and I think I remember reading about it on reddit some time ago.   It isn't like viegar or ryze where they are just making a skill-shot out of a targeted ability just because they hate targeted abilities and they want to remove most of them from the game.  Sending a bird out thematically as-well as practically makes sense.  It isn't as binary as before where it was a win all move against melee or lose all move against ranged.  Now you have the potential to do better against ranged and maybe just as good against melee if you play your cards right.  I believe this makes swain more healthy to play against and as.

Additionally, the rework on his q and the nerf to his e made it so you max e last.  Before 6.9, swain always maxed e first and then usually q into w, with some people going w into q.  To compare this to every other mid lane champion in the game, they all have some kind of wave-clear ability.  Swain never did. This is another aspect of his kit that made him incredibly binary.  By binary, I mean it could go either one of two ways, and it is always predictable with little depending on player skill.  When swain maxed e first, he had no waveclear, and would get pushed to tower and starved of gold by players playing the right champions and knowing the right strategy with the right jungle presence.  If you jungler was good enough to realize that their mid is a free kill if they can land some cc for you to follow up with, then you would win the lane every time because they would be overextended when they push the lane.  But if your jungler didn't want to gank or didn't have the experience or wasn't playing a champion with cc you could follow up with, than swain gets demolished, relentlessly.  Swain had no waveclear and no way to control the wave.  He would slowly fall behind in gold, and then if they were playing zed ekko or yasu, they would dive you.  Now if they didn't know they should push the lane, or they didn't play a champion that could push the lane, they are screwed because swain had the best trades in the game if you can get in range.  Before they nerfed the w, if you hit it on someone that was a kill or two behind, it was a guaranteed kill from full health in lane 1v1.  It was incredibly binary and it gets tiring to play as.  

 By maxing w first and then q second on the new swain, swain plays more like a typical mage and less like old binary swain e-q bot.  You have to focus on predicting where they will go when you place your q, and then where they will go when you place your w aswell.  It also makes it so if you don't hit your skillshots you get punished, but if you do, you get rewarded.  That is important for the health of both playing as him and against him.  additionally, it allowed you to nerf the numbers on his e because he now has waveclear and so he does better against champs that will push you to tower.  On live, if you max w and then q and then e, by level 3 or 4 in w you can clear the back wave of minions with a W into Q combo.  This is similar to brand's w into e combo do clear minions.  It leaves them both very vulnerable, but it allows them to control the wave.  It creates a new aspect of risk vs reward and gives the enemy an important window of time to initiate onto swain to maintain health of the game through counter-play options.  However, this is not to say that the ability is perfect, and swain is at an all-time low winrate because of it.  According to LoLking, he is at a 43.8%  winrate on may 5th and a 44% on may 4th.  https://gyazo.com/0f93a496047c998aa5f2ddad1523fa29   I can't help but compare this to season 5, his win rate was at 51-52 percent and was considered healthy by most people.

 Riot already said they are giving swain a numbers increase to his q, "Q damage to 30-110 from 25-85. "  This means that if you get 3 ticks of q, which you usually only get 1-2, You deal 75 extra damage at rank 5.  To put this into perspective, the self-buffed rank 5 torment lost 78 damage for a buff to the ap ratio by .24.  So basically in order to get your damage back you lost from the nerf, you would need to hit 3 ticks of q, which is even harder then before since they changed the tether radius from 900 (starting from your character which the max range would be 625)  into a small circle starting anywhere less then 700 units away with a radius of 350.  Most champions have  a movement speed of about 390 with boots, so if they are slowed during the duration of the q  then it usually hits them 1 sometimes 2 times considering they are going to be moving out of the radius of the circle before they even start taking damage since it takes time for the bird to reach where you place it.  I am not complaining about how long it takes for it to reach where you place it, honestly if it just instantly just showed up where you click your mouse it would look pretty weird.  However, I do think riot should do some things to compensate for the continuing mobility creep and how easy and quick it is to get out of the tether, combined with the fact that the tether is incredibly important to hit for a decent duration when trying to land your w on them.  Additionally, I read somewhere on these boards that swain's old q would continue to slow after the enemy has escaped the tether, and that is no longer the case.  That would be detrimental when trying to hit swain's w.  However, it does seem unhealthy to continue to slow the player even after they escape the tether, so my suggestion is two-fold:

1: Add a "Grounding" debuff to the enemy that is being tethered, similar to Cassiopeia's new w. this will counter the mobility creep meta and fit VERY well with swain's raven "Crippling" it's opponent's theme. I would argue the grounding debuff fits better with swain's theme and q then Cassiopeia's W, and it is more important for him aswell to keep enemies in the tether range, aswell as being healthier because it only effects one enemy at a time vs Cassiopeia's new poison which can effect multiple at once.

2: If swain is still in a weak spot after adding a grounding debuff and implementing my suggested changed to his ulti, Consider increasing the radius of his q from 350 to 375 or 400. Make sure you do this AFTER implimenting and testing the grounding debuff, beacuse this is just a numbers tweak and not as important as a real themeatic addition such as the grounding effect.

 Finally, I will get to his ulti.  before 6.9, you used to be able to run your ulti for exactly 1 second and hit all 3 caster creeps under the tower at the same time, enabling you to get all 3 of the cs if you were skillfull and expiridenced enough to use this strategy.  Now, the way the birds fly out is random and one at a time at .2 second intervals.  This is messy and I can not understand why riot would change the pattern at which the birds fly out into how it is now.  Expiridenced players knew how to farm with the old ulti, now it is completely up to luck and a few players have pointed out that the new ulti hits single targets at a rate slightly slower than before.  Riot already said they would remove the .25 second delay upon activation, but that is not what I am talking about.. I don't even care as much about the nerf to the drain rate of minions, I just hate how the current ulti spits out little birds with no order randomly.  Why would change how they are dispenced?  You can have all the ravens come out once per second like they did before, but instead have 5 ravens max instead of 3.  I would prefer a complete revert of the ultimate, but if you don't, I would still advise riot to revert the way the ravens are dispensed.

And Lastly, I STRONGLY believe that because of the changes to his q, it made swain much more healthy to play as and against, and therefore he does not need game-play rework. He just needs slight alterations.

TL:DR

1. Change the raven distribution rate on his ulti from 1 every 0.2 seconds to 5 every 1 second (all flying out at the same time). It is a small qol revert, and the new change to his ulti in 6.9 made swain more annoying to play and didn't add anything to his identity, balance, enjoyment or health. 1 Add a grounding debuff to swain's q and if he still needs buffs increase the radius of his q.