Talk:Skarner/@comment-8718181-20140217151715/@comment-8506165-20140221021627

1. "The biggest buff"? Try "the only buff, if you don't count the higher potential MS on W.

2. He's less shield-dependent in the sense that it's a worse skill - sure, it's marginally stronger in terms of shield strength, but means very little given they removed the heal thus making Skarner less tanky overall. You now need to build up AS with Q and continue spamming Q to maintain the AS, making his clears more mana-inefficient, and as the cap on AS is lower and you have to build up with it you get less strength from it overall than you did when it was on W. Bad.

3. This is like saying "Sure, they can remove 's slows, but she can build Frozen Mallet so it doesn't matter." Pigeonholing anyone into building one item to maintain the strengths of their kit is not a good thing when you're considering their relative states pre/post-rework.

4. E gives a stronger slow but with much less uptime and reliability and Skarner can't stick as well as he can (again, without building specifically to restore his previous strength). The loss of the heal means that he's effectively less tanky, which means he has to build more tankiness, leading on neatly to your next point:

5. He could do that before, but now it's less viable for him to do so, particularly given that as you said before, Iceborn Gauntlet is now virtually a must-have rather than just "a nice item" so that sort of disincentivises him to build Triforce. His damage is technically the same, but given that he now has to build more tankiness and more mana to compensate for his reduced mana-efficiency he can't maintain his old damage levels while still being viable.

Give me one thing new Skarner does better than old Skarner (saving the ult which really should've just been a fix implemented in his old kit, seeing as a targetted skill whiffing post-cast is a thing that shouldn't ever really happen from a gameplay point of view) and I'll listen. Until then you've just said "Skarner still has some of his old strengths like high DPS" which is irrelevant when he was underplayed before with all these strengths and more.