Talk:Ryze/@comment-1920550-20160712171308/@comment-4636093-20160712203815

They went into this on the Twitch stream.

His ult is there because it fits with the theme of an arcane wizard. In addition to this it gives him the utility which he so desperately needed to be balance-able, when someone is all damage then if they don't do damage better than another champion who also only does damage then they are useless.

In addition to this his old ult felt really poor to actually use. It was on a low enough cooldown with his passive to be considered a 4th basic ability, and they described it as simply turning him into Ryze+ for a few seconds with no real gameplay surrounding it.

A high powered long cooldown ult would go against the machine gun mage theme they wanted to keep, so really a utility focused long cooldown ult was the only way they could have gone.

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And his ult only has 2 ranks also because it is only utility. When it had 3 ranks they found very often that people just completely skipped leveling it at level 11 because the improvement from rank 1 to 2 was minimal and barely made a difference. They wanted to actually get Ryze to hit that max ranked ult sooner so that Ryze would actually be able to see a noticable difference between his level 6 ult and his max rank ult.

There was ALSO the issue that when Ryze had 3 ranks of his ult, Ryze's allies couldn't predict the range on it, and so would prepare to be warped in places Ryze couldn't do so until the next rank. All in all it was unnecessary confusion.

So thus they chopped off the rank 3 and made rank 2 the new 3. More satisfying to actually rank up and also more simple to understand for non-Ryze players.