Talk:Gragas/@comment-5077844-20141206172501/@comment-8506165-20141210183046

My main gripe with it is... not that it's bad, as such, more that it's suboptimal. Q spam will eat your mana pool pretty fast if you max it first, and if you don't then your poke in lane is bad. W isn't free any more so you can't sustain endlessly, and while it's nice CC E doesn't really match Leo/Thresh/Braum/Blitz for sheer lockdown, making it a bit more useful defensively than offensively. But if you want someone defensive, I'd just pick Janna. Maybe just because I like Janna a lot (and did even before her recent rise in popularity), but hey, support main life. I guess not everyone likes such a "pure" support. There's Morgy just for Black Shield too, though.

Things do get a bit different once you get your R, provided you're not one of the old full AP Gragas players who just throws it in the vague direction of the enemy forgetting entirely about the utility because "herpdiderp this is my nuke" (which there are still a large number of people doing) but... Eh, I'd rather play him top or jungle and have him gank/TP bot with his ult? I just feel whichever niche you're picking Gragas support for there are people that do it better, so I'd rather have him elsewhere on the team if he fits in there. But I won't hate someone who picks it in one of my games. Unless maybe they still try and go full AP.