The Progression of Malzahar

I know this is another Malzahar thread, but I think I have a very different perspective than most previous posts. I started playing League back in 2012 and immediately came to love Malzahar before I even played him. Even now 99 out of my 100 games are as Malzahar. What attracted me was the voidlings and lore. He seemed cool so I was dying to get good with him. That being said, I kinda wanna talk about his progression and how we got to where we are.

Pre-Rework Malzahar At this time, Malzahar, to me, was more focused on his DoT and had way more raw power in his abilities. He could wave clear with virtually just his E and a few autos. Null Zone (pool) and Nether Grasp (ult), sometimes Malefic Visions (space-aids) if needed, was how you killed your opponents and if you timed it just right, you could have your voidlings dealing massive damage on top of that. If you were doing well you could sometimes shred an ADC with just an ult. I liked that play style of a lockdown/assassin mage.

It worked well, but had problems in terms of gameplay. You really only damaged one target. You had to think about timing voidlings, placing your pool right in teamfight, while also ulting your target (AD/AP carry). People would expect you just walk into a fight and ult whoever which is hard when all you have is movement and flash (sometimes). All around he was kinda isolating himself which is why I LOVED the MYMU.

Rework Malzahar After the rework, Malzahar fixed a lot of the problems I saw playing him. You could now control when voidlings spawned (big bonus for me). You had some damage/CC protection so you had engage/escape potential which was non-existent beforehand. The ult damage was moved to the pool so you had greater participation in teamfights and you had ways of interacting by allowing your abilities to reset space-aids. All of this at the cost of less base damage on abilities, but easily more damage overall.

This Malzahar was honestly the most powerful and obviously too powerful. Voidlings proliferated like crazy and were lethal at the 3rd spawn, plus they had the execute. That along with Void Shift (the new passive) had Malzahar go from fragile control mage to outright bruiser. You could start a fight with voidlings and visions, let your passive reduce damage for 1 sec, take a hit or two then ult and watch most anyone die. It was disgusting, but I loved the brief moment of supremacy.

Patch 6.23 This, to me, was a perfect place for Malzahar. His passive was nerfed, but was still gave you the protection from quick assassinations, and his voidlings were far more reserved in their strengths. Riot even doubled the AP ratio on their damage which was a nice replacement. Malzahar was now in a great place of usable without being broken. He still had insane damage, but you had to think about what you were doing more.

Support Malzahar and 7.3 Nerf Whenever I got support in autofill, I chose Malzahar because he was always the only champ I played, even before the changes. It worked well then for the same reason it was working now. Voidlings were easy to summon and hard to counter unless someone knew how. The major drawback was that Malz needed money to be effective later in the game. With the change to Rylai's, Malzahar was now an annoying champ that most people in bot lane rarely had to deal with, but now was showing up in lots of games. I honestly thought people would learn to hard counter him with supports that abused his use/necessity for minions.

Instead, people just didn't like it. Which is understandable. I hate playing against certain champs no matter if they are balanced or not because it's just annoying. What I expected to happen was that Malz's Void Swarm would revert to 6.23 but slightly different:

1. Return to single spawn to reduce headache of numbers and allow them to be easily killed before proliferating
2. Remove AD scaling and up AP scaling to reduce early game damage
3. Increase the proliferation window to keep Mid Malz the same

I was devastated when 7.3 actually hit live and I saw the patch notes. The 0.35 sec cast window makes sense because the voidling visually has not appeared, but the 1 second delay on recast was catastrophic without appropriate counter balance. His time window to effectively do damage was increased so high but wasn't compensated with power increases as a DoT mage. I mean DoT should be D/T if you want to think about mathematically.

I'm not trying to say that I know how hard it is to balance a large-scale game like League of Legends, but I do know Malzahar. As someone who has loved what you've done with him so far, I just want some clarity on what you plan to do with him in mid lane or are theses changes here to stay.