Talk:Skarner/@comment-76.218.109.48-20130106025358

Extremely weak in S3. Jungle creeps are stronger and hurts Skarner more, which leads to his early level shields breaking faster. And the new masteries just doesn't fit with how Skarner is supppose to work.

Sure, he's suppose to be build tanky, but he also needs CDR to compete with his W nerf. However, they removed the CDR mastery in Defense and thus the most he can easily obtain is 4%. Assuming you do go 21 defense, you pick either between offense or utility. But utilify has increased buff duration to help out Skarner's mana problems early on along with the 20% CDR for his W. If you go 9 offense, then you either get aspd/CDR + most likely armor pen. Which helps you more for duels in the jungle.

His runes are also all over the place. You use to be able to run MS quints, but with the recent buffs in movement speed, they are not as strong as they use to be since everyone runs faster now and Skarner relies on applying that perma slow (which starts being viable at rank 2 but more effective at rank 3).

You could've also ran armor pen along with some aspd marks and replace your glyphs with aspd to get a nice 15% aspd and 10 armor pen for commonly used to be strong early levels, but since armor runes were not touched at all, everyone is a lot tankier.

Overall, regardless of season 3, I think the biggest nerf to Skarner was his W. Adding 4 seconds to his W that can be broken to remove the effect made him extremely weak. I understand he was strong in season 2 and I got to platinum just by playing him, but right now, he's way too squishy and has a much harder time pulling off his signature impale without his flash.