Talk:Xerath/@comment-973379-20140214211142/@comment-24042737-20140215110801

Just my opinion, my two cents.

Xerath has counter play in lane. He will quickly go oom, his main poke surpasses most ultimate abilities in mana cost quickly. He cannot just farm waves with Q and W unless he's using his passive, which with his short AA range will let you have a window of time to counter attack. And his spells have clear indications of where exactly they'll land. They also all have a nice startup animation, giving you time to react.

I don't like your propose re-rework of Xerath. His ultimate would be rendered useless.

First) As you pointed out, it'll be much easier to bait his ultimate. You get him to use it, he looses his long cooldown ultimate and possibly go oom. But seriously that makes it far too easy to counter his ultimate, I really cannot think of an ultimate so easily countered, and it would feel disgusting to start the fight off either oom or already half way there.

Second) It also encourages Xerath to just sit in one spot as long as possible. That makes him a literal sitting duck for either skill shots, like Nid, or for assassins. So even if the enemy team doesn't decide to wait out his ultimate, Xerath will probably have to end his ultimate early or die. The reason why the current ultimate works, roots Xerath and also has a long cooldown, is because it's range is so long that he'll probably never be forced to cancel it and it only has three shots, so he isn't encouraged to sit in it for too long.

Lastly) Your proposed ultimate seems to have too much stuff going on. Having increases ranges, so spamming regular skills, and having to, as I assume his missiles have low cooldown, spam the missiles as well. And it sounds like Xerath will lose mana quite quickly, each missle costing mana, as well as his regular spells, and each second his ultimate gets more and more mana intensive.

All in all, your rework doesn't sound very satisfying to Xerath players as they'll feel like the ultimate can't be optimally used. And trust me, Riot has been working on the Xerath rework for nearly a year, they have been through most of what you have thought of. Theres reasons why Riot has decided not to go with the iterations similar to yours. Riot may get a lot of shit for balancing but they usually have sound reasons.