I'm actually HEAVILY disappointed in Riot when it comes to Enchanters as an entire concept

Well, you guys made a whole new sub-forum dedicated to higher quality posts, so if I'm EVER going to have my opinion on this sort of thing feel like it means something, it's PROBABLY going to be here, and there's a lot I want to hit on, because I'm BEYOND disappointed in this regard. Note that everything I'm talking about here does NOT include Nami...like most people would probably agree.

Enchanter game play is extremely uninspired: What really makes an enchanter? Normally, it's a shield/heal you can put on someone else and a focus on defensive, reactive play. Now this isn't necessarily my issue. My issue is that the latter part is so excessively dry in function. Sona, for example, has NO variance in her kit. It's all automated in aiming, her passive being tied to AAs. Only her R can POSSIBLY miss, and it's a pretty big hit-box. She's basically a shit ton of numbers being blasted all over the screen. Karma's another example. People have been complaining FOR YEARS about her rework's execution, and the main pain point is that it's just really dang bland.

Their kits are also lazily designed on the balance spectrum: So lets look at a few of them

Just how much did we have to nerf this chick for her to FINALLY...FINALLY stop putting the entire support role in a choke hold? She has a knock up, a knock back, a slow, a heal, shield, and a MS speed towards her (usually for retreating). When it comes to peel, she's literally IMPOSSIBLE to outdo in any way, so Riot just took a massive cleaver to her whole kit and beat the shit out of it until it's finally possible. This shit's problematic. She's just a do-it-all design on the defensive spectrum. You can't ask for better peel, but enchanters are defensive champions. If you can just hard-disengage damn near anything while STILL having heals and shields in case something gets through...why the hell would you use any other enchanter? People would use Lulu just to try to match, not because she'd do anything of value in comparison (unless she'd go solo lane, which has been nipped).

Like...her WHOLE KIT is just dedicated to power spamming heals. I get it, but...there's NOTHING else she does to any real competence, so GW pretty much takes a cleaver to her overall output in a game. Everything about her balancing's wrapped around the notion that you just wanna blast W on someone's head, and there's no other thing in her kit to balance her around. Reducing her Q range, removing the Q sweet spot, being unable to heal more when hitting more targets with Q, changing how her W heal works so it's more dependent on landing Q, nipping her W's early cds...like, Soraka's balancing is basically entirely focused on her W, otherwise she'll just spam it in the fog of war...but what else does she ACTUALLY do in the game, especially after laning? There's hardly much of anything.

I bring this champion up so much because the sheer amount of lost potential for her design is astounding. Her game play doesn't translate to anything that feels impactful, so it's super hard to actually deal with her balancing without getting back lash for it. Riot says "Alright, these guys want to be more impactful. Let's try to fix her up". What do they do? Inject her with a bit of URF and set her loose on the rift. Nothing about her core game play was addressed, even though her core game play is the entire problem...since there's literally no variance in it save for one button. You see how Xin Zhao had a massive variance issue and Riot gave him a new skill shot to open up new opportunities via utilizing a new tool that can miss? Why on Earth was this not done for Sona? I'm still salty over it to this day.

My main issue is that Riot shows 0 real interest in tackling this at all: There are no plans to create a new enchanter. The last support was an assassin, and the one before a catcher. The support jungler before Rakan? A catcher, Ivern. The last enchanter made? Well...Nami. Riot's slowing down on champion releases, as well...which is smart, but the point remains that we're probably never seeing a proper enchanter from these guys for the remainder of this decade, and the last released one was 6 years ago, the better half of a decade.

They ALSO have no plans to do any VGUs on any enchanters at all. Hell, they aren't doing VGUs on any supports at all, save one for the forseeable future, based on all the champs they've showed even marginal interest in over the past year or so, and Morgana doesn't really need much work, anyway, since they're really just doing hers because Kayle and her are like a 2 for 1 deal. They said they want to mini-work Karma, but if anyone's paying attention, we'd know that Riot's record on VGUs is pretty good...and their record for the MINI-REWORKS is pretty "meh" overall. Many of them aren't any more balanced than they were before they got reworked (like all the tank ones), some were just wastes of time that see very little change in quality from before their changes (Annie, Leona, Vel'Koz), and some got reverted (Kog, Malz)...some of THOSE being more questionable than others (Rengar, LB). Hell, in Sona's case, she became an even worse balancing issue than before she was reworked. Regardless, Riot's now going to give Karma one of these sort of half-baked investments, meanwhile the real creative pushes that create things like Nunu, Warwick, Irelia, and Akali's new designs aren't really going to show up for bot lane champions.

Idk what the issue is, honestly. You COULD say "We're treating enchanters like artillery mages, where we don't really need a ton of them in the game"...but what stops you from doing work on the ones that are in the game right now? If you rework an enchanter, the number of enchanters doesn't increase, right? We can't get new ones for years, but we ALSO can't get work on these bland, wet-noodle designs we already have, and the little bits of "effort" that we do get are the super half-baked kind that gives us...whatever that Sona mini-rework was. Like, in comparison, Xin Zhao got a new move and a new property on his ult. Casseopia got a new move and a brand new (at the time) status ailment. Sona...got her numbers heavily...tweaked...?

Long story short: Enchanter designs aren't necessarily "lazy" because they're super dated. Time change, and as tech and techniques improve, Riot's able to do more with new champs that won't be reflected in their older champs. All of that is fine, but Riot's being super lazy in addressing all of this, just like they were super lazy in addressing fighters not being balanced in the game, and how they were super lazy with bot lane being marksman land instead of an actual lane in the game and now it's pretty much stuck that way. We're gonna have another prolonged issue we can't fix if Riot keeps getting comfortable sitting on issues instead of fixing them.