Thoughts on the current state of Malzahar (input appreciated)
To establish my credentials, I'm a diamond malzahar main, and I've mained him for four years now (diamond last year and this year), so I think I've got a good background for talking about what malzahar can or can't do.
The purpose of this post is to try to convey my thoughts on why Malzahar is currently bad in mid lane, and to either find out parts I'm wrong about or (ideally) highlight specific details on why he is weak to bring to Riot's attention, rather than just having another post about "Rito pls stop nerfing him he's already bad". Additionally, the specific scenarios and examples outlined in the post are usually true, but not without exception (however, they are exceptions to the general rule, not something that happens even one third of the time). The primary reason he is so good in support is that many of these weaknesses (introduced by the change to his w AFTER the rework, so that he is no longer rewarded for good play, rather than the w he initially had when the rework was released) are avoided by not having to cs, waveclear, or otherwise interact with anything, as when using e+w to win trades in botlane, which did not work with the previous version of w.
A key fact is that Riot's professed vision for Malzahar after the rework was to have the focus of his abilities be his voidlings. However, they disliked their initial versions of his w, and changed it to something that punishes mid laners but rewards supports for non-interactive play. In mid lane, the other champs will basically walk away from you and the voidlings cannot chase, because they slow down out of auto range. With the futher nerfs, anyone with aoe (so, virtually every mid laner, or any tank with a sunfire cape) kills your voidlings before they can even auto, unless you blow your entire combo. The worst part is, the voidlings usually die INCIDENTALLY to the other player's abilities; eg anivia will just ult + e you and the voidlings will die before ever making it to her, or xerath will w+q you and the voidlings will die instantly. In essence, to actually make use of the voidlings, the other player either needs to make mistakes (not uncommon in lower elo, much less so in high level) or you need to all in the other player just to do damage, beyond the paltry 250 you get from e at level 9, BEFORE resists. In practice, the damage from e is more like 140-160. That is to say, the focus of his kit (once again, directly according to Riot) is not functional due to the continued baseline nerfs, and the remainder of his kit fails to reward him for good decision making, by neutering the voidlings that make up the bulk of his damage. With either the w initially used during the rework or old Malzahar, you would at least be rewarded for good planning (eg dropping a few minions to low health, then building a swarm by killing them and THEN fighting the other mid laner) and decent positioning. This is no longer the case.
"But q resets e!" you say. Yes, until you realize it takes a quarter of your mana pool at level 9 to do it, even after buying a mana item. That is to say, you get punished for harassing, and it does minimal damage when you do, making it functionally worthless unless you use both charges of w (see above for why that's not useful unless you all in). If you DON'T all in, that's a grand total of (assuming optimal timing on the q) 300-ish damage from e and 80 (50 after resists) from q. (I'd also like to challenge you to name one other mid laner whose harass does all of 350 damage at level 9, assuming everything lands. I'm not talking about one ori q or something; if it's a thunderlords champ, then eg ori gets off q+w+auto+thunderlords proc. That's 500-600 damage right there, and it's on a much lower cooldown and much lower mana cost.)
If you do use e+q for harass, then any mid laner with waveclear (so, once again, virtually every meta midlaner) will use one or two abilities and shove you under tower, then roam and get a kill from another lane, while you're stuck autoing minions for 60 damage a pop. If you don't use e+q for harass, and use it for waveclear, it still takes so long that even a mordekaiser can just walk up and clear the wave faster than you. This isn't a hypothetical; it's a specific example that happens from time to time when I play against morde in mid lane. You can't even punish him because your voidilngs die faster inside the enemy minion wave when you have no minions, and his shield just powers through your e and e+q without the voidlings there to reinforce your damage.
Once the other mid laner gets qss, even as a first item, your kill potential drops like a rock, along with the fact that the mr directly reduces your damage, since you can no longer all-in and (as previously established) not going all in just gives you the low damage from q and e.
He wasn't unplayable before this patch, but he's pretty much dumpster tier right now. It's a little easier once you start teamfighting, and have the items to make q actually useful, but his voidlings still die instantly and you still get either cced or qssed when you ult, basically turning him into a q bot who can at best peel for his adc (once again, something a support malzahar is fine with, but a carry who can't do damage is not very useful). I'm fairly certain a champion who can only reliably use one ability is not typically considered either fun or good for game health.
Since Riot has claimed to identify the issue as one of voidlings having too much base damage, any of the following fixes should work (from least to most drastic, although only the last one is drastic in any sense of the term): a) remove base damage from his w and give it to the rest of his kit in the form of ap scaling, which is a very commonly used change by Riot, especially in the case of the tank assassins, so it is easy for them to implement in this case, b) reverting w change, c) change his passive to something less binary and more easily balanced, or d) reverting the rework entirely, which is what almost every pre-rework malzahar player wants anyway, but they probably won't do because they've only done it once across several failed reworks (kog'maw).
So that's my relatively well-qualified view on this matter, and I look forward to hearing from anyone, especially if it's a Riot employee saying something like, "We're not looking to fix this in the next patch or two, but we are definitely aware of these issues and are trying to resolve them." (better yet would be a statement that they're releasing a fix next patch, but I consider that unlikely).
Any CONSTRUCTIVE comments, either to support or refute these ideas, would be greatly appreciated.
Tl;dr Malzahar is weak in mid lane for these specific reasons and I hope someone from rito reads this.
