User blog comment:YourPrivateNightmare/Why I think the Gangplank rework failed/@comment-33536623-20150726232030

Playing him twice shows me what your talking about, I think Riot wanted to add more strengths to him while keeping the original, like tankplank, bruiserplank is stronger as well as having new interactivity with his kit. His passive is meant to be a crazy dueling ability to help the early game as you can set up a barrel, auto, q the barrel and then auto again for double burns, But he is obviously meant to be a late game champion which the barrles health decay scaling with level and him needing to Plunder minions for ss.

They couldve indeed added alot more integrity to his kit but they really wanted to keep his charecter I guess