As long as Riot never touch his REAL problems, ie his passive's double dipping issue with mana and AP cross+self scaling and his ulti that teleports the entire team that creates such a rift between pro and casual play in the first place, Ryze will NEVER be balanced.
And I'm saying this here, Ryze's current Q, W, and E are PERFECTLY balanced. It's so well designed it's one of the best designed high mechanic kits in the entire game. It's properly costed (extreme cost early that diminishes throughout the game as Ryze stacks mana, and bad base damage that gets better with level and items); gated by resource, farm and time (need mana stacking and Archangel), very conditional comboing sequence that gives Ryze a lot of options on the table but he only has access to one at any given time and not all at the same time; and ofc, Ryze needs proper skills to use given how specific his comboings are and that everything he does requires a successful execution of combos (a far cry from most other """high skill""" champs that ultimately are just faceroll kits pretending to be skill because it looks flashy or some shit; some of whom literally have 0 skill requirement like Yasuo, a champ with literally no designed failure state combined with a ridiculously disproportionately high and vast amount of completely free power/benefits).
People may say that Ryze's problem is his W. No, that's false. Because Ryze's W is only strong in his empowered version, and empowered version only comes at the cost of completely removing his DPS by disrupting his comboing entirely with EW (since Ryze's damage is either WEQ for a quick dirty burst or using Q refresh with alternating W and E (between Q's) for DPS, and EW simply denies all of that). Ryze has to choose between damage and CC, that is an appropriate conditional gating. His W is completely fine.
His actual problem is his passive that makes him do way too much damage after getting ahead due to what's effectively a double scaling, and his ultimate that is just way too powerful in organised play (and extremely niche in unorganised). If they have to fix Ryze, for the love of god, please work on his passive and ultimate for once and leave the QWE alone.
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And speaking of Ryze reworks. I read once where someone joked that if Ryze were to ever get a rework again, then Zombie Ryze should be his Classic skin. I chuckled quite a bit after reading that.
