Make all of the damage over time, that way new saplings only refresh the duration rather than add more damage removing the possibility of stacking saplings into a brush to one-shot someone.
For jungle Maokai it can be every tick of SAPLING damage against MONSTERS reduces the cooldown by 1 or 2 seconds since he would no longer be able to do the stack a bunch of saplings to burst out a camp anymore.
Salron2 votesA single sapling does too much damage on it's own to begin with This doesn't fix that
Stacona2 votesThis fixes sapling stacking, and then we can re-evaluate how much damage each sapling does once one thing gets fixed.
Salron3 votesSapling stacking is only an issue because of how much damage they do If you nerf sapling damage upfront, that makes stacking less of an issue already THEN if it's still an issue, you make additional changes targetted at that
MagicFlyingLlama1 votesWhy would we fix glorious crapling mines?
PrinceOfStorms1 votesWhy is this an issue? Don't facecheck bushes and you won't get killed by bush saplings.