Talk:Xerath/@comment-5663971-20140208115746/@comment-6778736-20140210023800

The individual projectile is mediocre, but having two hits easily rivals Ziggs' center-damage ratios (250/375/500 +.9 versus 380/490/600 +.86 from 2 Xerath charges.), as well as most mage ultimates in the game. The idea is that they overloaded the ultimate's damage, but made it harder to hit all 3 charges. Although not graphically, it stil feels like his old ultimate to an extent while supposedly being balanced.

It's also because the people working on Xerath really wanted to give him massive range, which was supposed to be an enhancement of his basic abilities with a medium cooldown but that fell off from the project. With that out of the picture, they were between a rock and a hard place - Riot's current design abhores 2-second burst with big range which is Xerath's current playstyle more or less (Lux is obviously a magical exception because old beloved champion that has a big fanbase), and changing the ultimate's gameplay would either make it some form of a Ziggs ult rip-off, or a Karthus rip-off. With very little time between juggling this project and a few others, there wasn't any time to change the ultimate significantly, give it internal health testing and have the rework be done. Resources have been spent. and results are expected.

So what happened in the end was that they made the ultimate basically be his old one, disabled basic ability use to prevent ludicrous lethal combos, made the radius ~ 60(?) units less, bumped the base damage up by 65/45/75 and lowered ratios on all ranks by .17, although these are (for now) the final values after damage was redistributed after the single target/champion damage tweaks. Since the radius is smaller than a Corki Q, making all 3 skillshots ridiculously hard to land, they added the grace of having each blast reveal 500(?) units around the damage area, so the ultimate has the secondary use of scouting.

TL;DR Xerath's damage per missile on ultimate has always been at Corki Q levels, but it's damage totaled with a stun+ Q and free magic peneasily made it lethal damage. The thing that vastly improved with Xerath's rework is the base damage on ultimate, for the price of the AP ratio. What makes it powerful is a balance of quality and quantity with added rapid-fire.