Math About Skarner's Cooldowns
I'm hoping to get some sort of response here to quell our fears about Skarner's upcoming loss of his passive. Particularly in the cooldown department as it seems a little much if both his damage, scaling, and cooldowns are getting shifted in favor of a small stun and boost to movement speed.
People are getting upset about Skarner no longer being able to reduce his cooldowns by snipping at things. Let's go ahead and look at some of the math here. Skarner's old passive reduced his cooldowns by 1 second if he attacked a champion, and .5 if he attacked a minion or monster. Let's ignore the damage tradeoffs since his passive adds in new utility and there's not a good solid way to numerically compare utility with damage.
Crystal Slash - Skarner's Q is the same, it functions identically as before. He also gets movespeed and less damage but that's beyond the scope of this post.
Crystalline Exoskeleton - At rank 1, Old Skarner would need to autoattack 3 times to make it match the new value. At rank 2, it is 3.5, then 4, then 4.5, then 5. This is solely against champions. Against minions it would take an impractically large number of attacks to match it. This seems about fair to me since it is not often that Skarner attacks anyone for an incredible period of time, they usually get away or are gotten.
Fracture - Skarner would have to attack an enemy champion twice in order to make it match the new cooldown, or a minion four times. This is easily achievable, so there is almost always going to be slightly more downtime on his E. It is less punishing when it misses, however. (Which was the problem, but again, beyond the scope of this post.)
Impale - Here's the big one. Skarner's ultimate is his longest CD ability and now it's cooldown is going down by a flat 20 seconds at all ranks. This is the equivalent of 20 attacks against champions, or 40 (!) attacks against minions. Oftentimes Skarner will retreat into the jungle after ganking with his ult to snip away and get it back ASAP. 40 attacks is a LOT. Barely achievable before it refreshes since he has to move around the jungle too. This might put a little more downtime on his ult during really heavy teamfights but otherwise isn't that much of a change.
There's one final note to make. Cooldown reduction. With 20% cooldown reduction (Spirit Stone item + Iceborn Gauntlet, fair items to assume on Skarner) His old W at middle rank would only take 3 attacks to match its current value. His E? The same. His ult? (Assuming mid rank again) 16 champion hits or 32 minion hits. This difference gets even larger if he builds other CDR/tank items.
Basically, Skarner's reduced cooldowns in compensation for the loss of his passive mean less and less as his CDR goes up. The extra utility in his stun and movement speed very well better be worth the increased ability downtime in addition to his lowered damage AND Scaling. Including his old (hard to notice for most) CDR scaling. This might be part of the problem - you have to do a lot of thinking to understand how effective Skarner was with his old passive.
