Why I Have to Give Up my Main (The problems with Xerath)

Xerath is currently one of the ten least played champions in the game, and while I love playing him, it's not hard to see why he's underplayed.
He is simply too specific in what he excels at. His success depends almost entirely on his ability to maintain distance from his opponents, but once the distance is closed, he has no ability counter play at all. This would be a manageable disadvantage, but he has very low mobility, and insufficient CC and consequently, any player with a dash (or willing to burn flash) gets a free kill on Xerath whenever his flash is down, regardless of skill, champion level, or build. This sounds like a pretty extreme statement, but hear me out before you call me crazy.

First lets review his kit: P: Mana surge; Grants mana for auto attacks, half as much against minions and monsters. Has a 12 second cooldown. Q: Arcanopulse; Very long range, high damage, short cooldown. Very high mana cost, but all around a very good skill.
W: Eye of Destruction; Long range, good damage, applies a 2.5 second 10% slow on the outer ring, and a rapidly decaying 70% slow on the inner ring. Costs only slightly less mana than Arcanopulse, but is a decent skill nonetheless. E: Shocking Orb; Long range, relatively low damage, and applies a stun that lasts .5 to 2 seconds depending on distance traveled. R: Rite of the Arcane; Amazing range (especially after level 11), good damage, roots Xerath in place while he's firing, .8 second delay between firing each shot.

Since this discussion is intended to center mostly around players with a high mastery on Xerath, we'll forget about the inherent difficulties of playing ap characters that are 100% skillshot based, and we won't get into the details of why his passive is almost useless late game or why it is a major source of conflict within his kit. For now I just want to focus on why its so critical fro him to maintain a long distance from his enemies, and why he isn't able to do that right now.

The trouble with this kit is that both E and R become unusable at close range. A .5 second stun doesn't do much to help you escape, the damage from it is low, and the cooldown is long. Similarly, while the damage from R is good, the fact that it locks all other abilities, roots Xerath in place, and has a delay between each shot prevents it from being useful in close combat. This leaves Xerath with only 2 useful abilities up close neither of which is an escape, and then he's down to auto attacks, which don't do much damage, but hey, at least he'll die with a full mana bar.

At this point you may be thinking to yourself, "Having trouble at close range is just the price you pay for having good long range skills, just practice keeping your distance and you should be fine." and you would be right too, if his kit made that possible.

The trouble is once again with the E, but this time also W a little bit, but still mostly E. Unlike most (all?) other stuns in the game, Shocking Orb does not cancel abilities or stop dashes (this might actually be a bug). This means that even if you land your stun on an approaching champion with a dash and a stun, snare, or knock up, it still won't help you escape if they started their dash ability before your orb actually hit them. Even worse are the champions who can't be hit during their dash. On any other champion, you would just wait until they use their dash but on Xerath, waiting also means forfeiting most of the duration of the stun. If Eye of Destruction applied a longer/stronger/less rapidly decaying slow or if Xerath was naturally a bit faster, you might be able to use it to put enough distance between him and his opponent after the dash for his stun to become meaningful again, but a 70% slow that decays rapidly just isn't enough to give him that space. I know that every champion has hard counters, but the size of the list resulting from just this issue is huge. Then you have to add to the list any Champion that's just plain fast or has teleports Then account for the ones that can use spell shields to ignore your stun Then all the ones who can close the distance just by walking up to you And on top of those lists, you can start adding all the champs that counter Xerath in ways other than closing the distance to negate 2 of his abilities.

I could keep adding to the list, but I don't need to to make my point. Honestly, what other champion has more than 60 hard counters? Xerath will always be my favorite champ, but until he's given more mobility and his stun is fixed, he just isn't viable at higher levels of play where opponents know to dive him.

Goodbye old friend