Talk:Swain/@comment-33172118-20180503190340/@comment-33172118-20180504015342

@gronach Believe it or not but I read it all. Perhaps because your connotation reads you're actually considering what you're saying.

For his W I kind of feel conflicted. I get it's suppose to be another nuke and does not serve actual scouting purposes, - but it makes the hero significantly more bland. It's just...an AoE damage with slow about always. Very easy to avoid unless the opponent isn't paying attention or simply locked down. I'd much rather have something that can reliably be used to scout enemies without it being another drop in the bucket to some obvious combination. But those are just my 2 cents, I'm personally more of a Dota player and thus biased towards strategic niche plays rather than constant combat.

His E is very obvious. It's incredibly easy to land on opponents that simply don't care as it instantly connects at it's maximum range. While back I had a mirror lane at top against another Swain and neither of us ever hit their E - simply for we both knew what range it approximately has and how easy it is to avoid even after being cast. This cripples Swain and makes his damage unreliable unless against melees that want to deliberately start a slap fight with him. He's also really poor vs any melee with a dash of any sorts as he can't trade if he doesn't land his root.

I do agree his Q deals mental damage lategame, as I pointed out. But I do feel like the way it curves is very poorly balanced. During the laning phase it's nothing more than a visually pleasing fart that's both obvious and easy to avoid with a little positioning. In addition it causes Swain to run into severe mana problems even when using it to lasthit batches of creeps. This makes Swain very weak in the laning phase against players that know what he can do and when but ensures he will scale into a very dangerous opponent for foes that rely on close quarter combat. Swain feels very much like an actual AP carry the way he functions currently as his impact lategame is spectacular when farmed.

His ultimate I'm on the fence about. My problem with it is how, once more, difficult it is to put it to actual use. In a duel it won't help you for fuck all as everything it does is underwhelming. There's even a good chance you won't be able to use the burst damage at all. It scales linearly, which is painful as that's rather extreme considering how much it can potentially heal, with more enemy champions - meaning it can easily be a gamechanger. But comparing it to other AoE "gamechanger" ultimates such as - like you mentioned - Nasus, Renekton and the likes of Malphite - these abilities do indeed contribute to their power to duel besides being very strong against several opponents at a time. Swain MUST be in some form of a team skirmish for it to be actually useful. I must say I'm not very sure how strong it actually is in comparison to the former however.

tl dr: Swain isn't bad and I never said thus, but I do believe the way he scales is weird(way too late game oriented), he's unreliable and requires both a rather specific enemy team and allies that can enable him.