Thanks for the quick and thorough responses guys.
I'll present you guys with our current perspective on Lulu.
Firstly, we genuinely think she's still very much a viable Bot Lane Support champion. Through both internal tests and external monitoring of the Live and Competitive game, we think she still brings a lot to the table.
Admittedly, we've probably significantly weakened Support Lulu players who maxed E first instead of Q, and maxing Q will probably the way to go right now (not sure on this, only theoretical). Unfortunately, we still fundamentally believe that her E damage pattern doesn't present any compelling gameplay which is why we went forward with that change. At the end of the day, we'd prefer if Support Lulu's who max E first are doing it primarily for its defensive shielding capabilities.
Secondly, Lulu is probably still stronger as a Mid champion in the current game landscape than she is a Bot Lane Support.
We're honestly a little torn here on this one. In past situations, we'd take a huge hammer swing to ensure that she was a stronger Support rather than a Mid, but when we do that we are essentially "enforcing the meta" so to speak. More importantly than being a really catchy phrase, "enforcing the meta" reduces experimentation and discovery of new things in the game and it honestly sucks when we have to do so in order to maintain the integrity of the game (but we have and will continue to do so when necessary). Ultimately, we think that this is a pretty important aspect of LoL - to provide you guys with a never-ending path of discovery and mastery in the game.
So instead in this case, we've decided to instead to ensure that Mid Lulu wasn't overly dominant, rather than just destroy her viability in the solo lane. Unfortunately, this does mean that we need to take into account more factors whenever we make any changes to her now if we want to preserve both playstyles.
I will say, if we do make changes again to address her power level in Mid Lane, we will most definitely have to compensate her in Bot Lane. The most interesting part of Lulu's kit is the offensive / defensive use cases for each of her spells, but they become problematic when she's not actually making any tradeoffs when she chooses one over the other. One idea we've thrown around are putting some damage incentives back into offensive Whimsy - for example Polymorphed targets take additional damage or have reduced Armor/MR. This means that a Lulu who wants her full damage combo has to risk committing forward rather than being able to safely hold onto her defensive W to easily initiate or escape at will.
As it currently stands, we have no plans for further changes to Lulu at the moment since we'd like to continue to see how she trends in the following patches. We are always working on tons of projects an you guys can get a glimpse of our current focuses in the 4.7 Patch Forecast (http://community.na.leagueoflegends.com/en/c/live-gameplay/POLbQ0Nl-47-patch-forecast).
Sorry if this is ultimately disappointing news for you guys, but I appreciate the time you guys took to bring this up.
switched to maxing shield because Q spam would make you quickly go oom and shield provided reliable damage and protection.