User blog comment:Lord of Harvest/My suggestion to Darius's ult./@comment-5194571-20121015142931

Most people rage about how Darius is OP, but no worries, I used to be one of them. I just learned how to deal with him in lane. But even then, you can't go the whole game without fighting him at least once. I admit, his ult does do a lot of damage and it is really annoying. Therefore, people want to nerf it. Your suggestion is pretty nice. It lowers his laning presence, but still keeps the Darius players that only play him for his ult happy. The thing I find with Darius is that he's a little too simple. The higher-level players will calculate how much damage his ult will do, which helps, but you don't see that much below 1.6k elo. They just attack until low health and press R. Usually getting a kill, leading to a snowball.

If I were to nerf his ult, I would do it differently. I would reduce the number of stacks on his passive from 5 to 3. The base damage on his ultimate is just fine, the 20% bonus per stack is fine as well. What I have a problem with is when he messes his ult up, but his passive still kills you, even if you killed him already. In a lengthy engage, his passive does so much damage, lifesteal can't get through it, nor can anything else I can think of. By reducing his passive stacks, he deals less damage in an engage, allowing more people to 1v1 him at any point in the game, particularly in lane, while also making his ult a bit more complicated where it takes a bit more planning than simply pressing R.