The Gragas rework broke my heart.
He was a strong but balanced burst mage for years, who had a strong and safe laning phase and good late game utility, but generally offered lower sustained damage than a lot of other mages.
His mobility was deemed a little too strong, so Riot reduced it. But they didn't want to out-right nerf his kit, because he wasn't actually holistically overpowered, so they offered the compensation buff of removing the damage splitting mechanic on his body slam.
For those who don't know: body slam had an incredibly high base damage value, but used to split it's total damage dealt between all targets hit. So the ability had low damage unless you hit an insolated target. This was an interesting and fair mechanic with that added counterplay and skill cap to his laning phase. The high base value was balanced around the fact that it only dealt significant damage if you managed to hit it on an isolated target.
When Riot simply removed the damage splitting without touching the ability's base value, he became absurdly overpowered for obvious reasons.
So instead of simply reverting this change, Riot decided to turn Gragas into a bruiser.
Except, they simultaneously nerfed his innate tankiness/sustain on top of his burst damage. His W's damage reduction remained the same, except instead of having a 100% uptime, it is only available for a small percentage of the time. His mana sustain was removed, and his passive got nerfed.
Now he's one of the worst champions in the game.
