Talk:Xerath/@comment-173.89.167.104-20121112212055/@comment-4131177-20121113165901

Those arguments are all only half right. Many champs without escape ability are played. Orianna has no escape either (the speed on W does not realy help when ganked, and, depending on the circumstances, it is also extremely unreliable), and the only hard CC she has is her ult, and without her ult her power potential drops drastically as well. When you look more deeply, you will find that many mages that are played in tournaments lack something of those.

The W lock down increases your Range drastically, that is not a valid argument either IMHO. I wanna see the champion that punishes you while you are poking at him from 1300 range.

The problem is that his Passive ability, while it is a very good passive overall, does not benefit you in early laning, while other midlaner's passive tend to grant something usefull, like spellvamp or additional cooldowns or damage in some way. Xerath does not offer that. In addition to that, his W suffers from extremely long cooldowns if not leveled up early, while the %-m-pen is also hardly noticeable in early game.

Additionally, ignite is not a viable summoner spell on Xerath. When you are doing it right, you are NEVER in range for ignite. Its range is so low that you can impossibly add it to your combo. For the same reason, exhaust can only be picked defensively on Xerath, and most players want an offensive summoner spell instead. But most people are so blinded by the midlane flash/ignite meta that they still pick ignite and thereby play with only 1 summoner-spell during the laning phase.

If you sum the abovementioned things all up, that are a ton of early-game-disadvantages.

Xerath offers something totally different in return, which is range. I am not sure why it is, but it seems Range is not as much desired as damage/sustain by the community. If people would understand that range is something incredibly valuable, and that the range makes up for all the abovementioned deficits, then Xerath would be played more often.

I personally pick Xerath a lot, and stomp people's lane most of the time. For summoners, i pick exhaust when laning against champs like Ahri (a horrifying Matchup as Xerath, but exhaust usually saves you when she ults to you), and in other cases i pick teleport, clarity, or even clairvoyance. The latter 2 are really underestimated, mainly because they are very useless on every other mid laner. However, with clarity i managed to denie farm to a morgana (!!) and the enemy could not even properly gank me since i warded enough (warding is essential as Xerath, another reason why people dont pick him up, cuz "warding is boring" *rolls eyes*), and clairvoyance already gave me plenty kills that i could grab due to the combination of vision and 1300 range. Also, Clairvoyance is just always a useful spell to have on your team.