It's time to talk about Rumble again, Riot.

So, it's no secret Rumble is weak right now sitting quite sad as the third worst toplaner behind Shyvanna and Warwick, which is pretty pathetic. (44.87%) I'd like to open a discussion about what we, as the community, feel would be the best course of action to take on Rumble going forward. I'm very passionate about Rumble and his unique identity as an AP toplane teamfight control mage. Firstly however, I'd like to talk about his recent changes in 6.1

**General COLLISION RADIUS 50 ⇒ 35 ** This is a welcome addition but more of a quality of life change than anything else, it's the kind of thing that should have been in his kit to begin with considering how important his Q is to his kit, and besides it's only a band-aid on the bigger problem of minions and pathing in general, but that's not the discussion I'm trying to work towards here. A good "buff"

Q - Flamespitter RANGE 550 ⇒ 600 TICK RATE 0.5 seconds ⇒ 0.25 seconds

Well, firstly, the range increase is interesting to say the least. Rumble has fallen out of meta mostly as a result of powerful AD bruisers with gapclosers coming back to the top lane and Rumble walking into Q range is usually enough to get him jumped on, this is a buff to his laning phase because it allows you to "bully" your opponents from a further distance away. Honestly, I don't agree with this one at all, it seems somewhat pointless and the difference isn't incredibly noticeable either, it's such a tiny change it doesn't affect any of his previous matchups whatsoever, Rumble doesn't magically do well into Jax now just because his Q hits a little further.

The tick rate increase seems minor at first, and it was mentioned that it was added in order to "Make CS'ing with him a little easier" however it's just given Rumble this unhealthy ability to proc Thunderlords decree in 0.75 seconds, which is frankly absurd. The tick rate's change explanation doesn't help those of us who already came to terms with the tickrate anyway. I will admit it feels a lot nicer, so I'm overall happy with this change, however because of it's thunderlords interaction I don't see it sticking around. These buffs come together to give him a laning phase which is only slightly better than usually because of the unintentional ability to proc thunderlords quickly, but his laning phase isn't where the problem lies.

A good Rumble player can work with any lane after all, so let's put that to the side for a moment so I can address the core problem with Rumble: His ultimate.

Rumble is heavily reliant on his ultimate, he is a strong teamfighter because of it, so take a look at this:

The Equalizer Cooldown increased to 120 / 110 / 100 from 105 / 90 / 75.

Back in 5.16 Rumble's ult CD got nerfed, this was a necessary nerf in my opinion, but I feel it went too far by taking a LOT of his power from late game. For a champion who is almost entirely reliant on doing anything but single target burst without his ult, it's on an absurdly long cooldown. I know Rumble was popular in pro play for a long time last summer split and this change was mostly to shift desire away from him but I feel like he's been away for long enough now that solo queue players do not have to continue being punished by "The Azir effect"

So I believe I speak on behalf of all Rumble players when I say: Meet us in the middle Riot, give us the cooldown reduction buffs on the Ult we deserve, they don't need to go back to 5.15 numbers, but please, it's horrible trying to work cooldown reduction into his already strict build path and taking CDR in runes sacrifices defenses Rumble needs to survive the laning phase and scale into a teamfighting monster. However, it's hard to be a monster, even when fed, when you have to play around the fact that you are incredibly weak in most 1v1 and 5v5 scenarios while your ult is down, as it should be. But when there are ultimates as game changing as Lux's on such a short cooldown I find no reason why Rumble's must be gated so heavily.

I'm aware the reason Riot is keeping him so suppressed it a result of his pro play history, it'd just like to hear it from the horse's mouth personally to be honest. No champion should be forced to sit at a winrate so low, if his kit is really this hard to balance I'd suggest just lining him up for a rework and benching him until then instead of giving up piecemeal buffs to try and keep us happy when the real problems aren't being addressed.

It may be too early into the patch to judge the buffs, but I doubt they will help change anything in the long run and I think Riot understands this too, so that's why I'm opening this discussion now, because I just want to know if I'm going to have to bench Rumble until he gets the love he deserves. I'm interested to hear what the community thinks about this so I've created a poll, do you think Rumble should get some power back in his ult or do you think Riot is moving in the right direction toying with small buffs until he's in a good spot again? Perhaps you think he needs a full rework because he's clearly unbalancable? Please leave me your opinion.