Talk:VPBE/@comment-24795478-20141026135037/@comment-3974211-20141026151409

They should just make his abilities scale with bonus mana and give him standard base damages. The reason his base damages are so long is to factor his base mana, which affords him base damage that no other champion has access to. But ultimately the issue with Ryze is he has no levers that make him balanceable - he is either overpowered or underpowered. When he's viable mid he just bullies out all other mid laners; and when he's not viable mid he just moves to top lane and does the same thing. He does too much single target damage for how much AOE damage, sustain and durability he has; and for how cheap and easy his build is (mana items are easy to purchase).

Perhaps they should rework his Q into a skill shot that has no cooldown, but instead has a channel time (that is reduced by CDR) - so his Q would be similar to the core damage dealing spells in World of Warcraft (channel, throw it, channel, throw it, channel, throw it). It would turn his Q into a functional attack-replacer that everyone uses it as (similar to Annie's Q, Cassiopeia's Q/E, Karthus' Q, etc). They should then rework his costs and passive to make his mana more similar to energy (so his uptime is relatively short, but his downtime isn't permanent - which is the issue of other mana champions).