Talk:Xerath/@comment-15020375-20140329005143/@comment-6778736-20140329170132

A swing and a miss, Kerp couldn't take advantage of Xerath's earlygame and far too often attempted harass with Arcanopulse within xPeke's vision, was impatient, rushing shots that were easily dodged and later on spammed far too many blind shots, which are highly inefficient considering the toll on Xerath's mana, the dodgability of his skills when anticipated and the very significant channeling/delay, leaving massive gaps in Xerath's poke if used like a Lux/Nidalee/Gragas/Ziggs i.e. fire and forget.

His ultimate usage was questionable at times, often attemting to fire at an enemy with approx, 50% health, which is highly ineffective use unless said target is suffering from a Wither-esque slow, chained in hard CC or (although irrelevant for the purpose of competitve play) with a significant level disadvantage.

The LCS game displayed several factors about the rework, the first of which being that Xerath's playstyle is very unintuitive compared to any other poke mage, requiring constant abuse of Fog of War. It also displayed another massive flaw in Xerath's design, namely his complete lack of a level 6 power spike, because unless the opponent is inept or unaware, Xerath will have an extremely low probability of lethal damage through constant poke, finished off with a successful ultimate. That's not even factoring in flash-dodges and the painfully relevant mobility creep.

Exclusively providing easily dodgable damage with vast reprecussions for missing, the massive amount of time spent casting, ex.: 3 max range Qs in a teamfight, 1W, 1 E, ultimate activation and three casts makes for a whopping 8.7 seconds spent exclusively standing in place and readying a spell/casting a spell.

This is not even considering the cooldown between Q casts. To cast every spell once WITH max range Q, Xerath needs to spend 4.7 seconds casting, channeling or self-rooting. Even his absolute best-case scenario of casting point-blank requires a bare minimum of 3.1 seconds of delays, with the stun being at its minimum duration of .75, having every other acton be highly dodgable AND Xerath being at the mercy of the enemy champion, potentially dodging and killing Xerath, or inflicting CC, making casting take even longer.

For the sake of comparison, most mages' combos require about 1.5-2 seconds to fire off everything needed, have significantly larger hitboxes, occasional click-targeting and burst to boot.

It's unfortunate, there's so many things wrong with this rework on so many levels, from a mechanical standpoint, from a kit standpoint, implementation and testing, balancing, champion identity, efficiency, game feel and probably even more I can't think of right now.