Reign of Gaming

Lawdy, Wit's End looks very attractive now.  I might be able to use it in my Phoenix Udyr builds again.

Another one I'm surprised wasn't touched on (although you mentioned in a comment you missed several) was Shaco.  That champ has been a veeeeery tedious one to balance, and as a jungler, he was very nasty to play against in the past.

I'm surprised he hasn't been mentioned in other comments either, a good one was (and arguably still remains) a very consistent threat at all elo levels in solo queue.

I love schooling Luxs with Xerath, but yes, she's tiring to see.

Oh boy, here comes a really long post.

I want to comment more specifically on the champion selection portion on this article, although my points could possibly be applied to the other parts in the article.

I like this article from a conceptual glance, but this really steers dangerously close to a stagnant mentality that breeds this putrid cesspool of a mentality: "play champs that are subjectively better or I report u".  From what I've taken from this piece, that's not exclusively what article really is about, to me, I felt it focused on a crucial facet in the though process involving the decision in a given choice (in items, scenarios, and champions), because frankly there are nuances, especially among champions, in a "archetype" or role that make them different/relevant in a certain circumstance/condition (ex. champ A might have a better synergy with the given initiator on his team, even if the other is way better according to current trends).  As long as you have such "incomparables", you can't truly say "identical, but better" for several.champs.  Maybe I am taking this the wrong way, and you are indeed implying that many champions should theoretically never be played as long as generally "superior" options exist because of them being a liability, in which case I strongly disagree.

Let's take that Kennen v. Morgana example.  Morgana from looking purely at kit, and assessing their traditional matchups, Morgana should look like the more valuable option, according to what you said.  However, if anything, Kennen has been seeing a slight resurgence (albeit in top lane), meanwhile Morgana is still in the mire.  Why?  One arguable reason is because now that AD casters are actually a viable pick, Morgana tends to belly up a bit against most AD casters, whereas Kennen is actually pretty good at dealing with them (in general) because of his emphasis on more constant harass and trade control.  Specific little things like this can make even seemingly inferior picks shine if "the planets align" or the reward is assessed as worth the risk.  However, this means even more careful and deeper assessment in the decision.  Unfortunately, because of the general direction of the article, and how easily it gravitates towards this, it degenerates to this god-awful dogma that we see here:

Quote from BrotherLaz»

This is what gets me about people picking Ziggs, Viktor, Nami etc. No, they are not useless. There is however no reason to pick them, so picking them is intentionally helping the enemy team just to have fun. This is reportable.

At least if you pick Urgot you may have a plan. Maybe you want to hold the lane while your support roams. Maybe you want to initiate. But why would you pick Ziggs...?

It's one thing to consider a pick to be inferior, but it's entirely another to justify it as a reportable offense.  It's funny too, because in Asia Ziggs had a FotM period about a month or two ago, and one of LCS' underdog teams worked a Ziggs pick in to a decent amount of success this week.

People said the same thing for Xerath (I myself had to deal with the "lol Xerath is garbz" backlash quite a bit), but the truth was, he actually had a unique perk that more popular champs of a similar function (like Lux) didn't have, that made him a preferred pick in some circumstances: higher, harder to mitigate, raw burst and strong cohesion with hard AoE engages.  I can name at least a couple of things that Ziggs has that some of the other champs similar to him do not (like how strong a lane bully he is).  Not to mention the article itself is a little wrong to compare Ziggs to Anivia, as both are actually quite different in "archetype", even if they have a lot of similarities (AoE control and sustained sieging utility).  Ziggs is a specific "square" to the Long-ranged AoE family of "rectangles" among the AoE "quadrilateral" mages, but not any old rectangle can exactly take on the attributes of this "square".

I think a healthier discussion can be made as to when a champion is merely not desired for certain reasons and critically/objectively looking at one for strengths, and when it is truly a fault from champion design.

Besides, at the end of the day, there's no way you're going to have success with forcing a "cylinder" player through a triangular prism, even if it is the seemingly better option.

On an whole other note, there are cases where this is actually the case, and this is partially the reason we have the champion reworks we see today, when a champion truly suffers from flawed design, and sometimes it's the case where the champion truly has an inherently weak kit and does not satisfy a function that is needed.  However, there are several champions where they are actually fine, but just undesired.  Otherwise we'd be having plenty more proposed champion reworks from Riot.

tl;dr It's a decent article, but I definitely don't like the direction it can be taken.

Ok, watch some OGN/Stars war matches from about 1-2 months ago, Ziggs had a FotM stint in the asian scene not too long ago, and he had fairly decent success.

Wow, I'd definitely part with the magic damage on Tiger for those changes any day!  Will finally make it synergize a lot better as a spell with his overall kit and not feel as awkward to put points in when building for Phoenix.

I agree with a great deal of this, especially the BV statement (there was an LCS match where the BV actually was exhibiting really good use for the ADC against a Vi+Malph comp), although there is one thing I feel a bit nit-picky about, and that's Hydra on Zed (and although I don't really play him, I think this also applies to Talon to a lesser extent).

Hydra is very much a sink on him, because the item encourages AAing on a champ that uses autoattacks very discretely and physical abilities for similar purpose (like to heal up minorly between fights from BT/BotRK, or proccing passive during ult combo), the active doesn't aid his combo in a way BotRK does (sticking power and adding more nuke damage to the proc, and Zed is a lot more single-target intensive in his specific role than an AoE physical damage dealer, albeit he does a lot of AoE physical damage but through abilities) and if there's one thing Zed doesn't need to invest money in, it's waveclear/splitpushing (one WEQE or even just WEE combo clears ridiculously fast).  The AD is nice, but why not get a BT if that's what you're looking for?

Awww, sad about the revert on the Galio buff, although I'm happy for the Tristana buffs.

It's replacing the chain vest for Zhonya's Hourglass' recipe.

I was confused by this too, it never said whether they removed Faerie Charm out of the recipe.