Talk:Braum/@comment-5877442-20140515173131/@comment-6281696-20140516170240

Well, yes as long as you can manage to not be on your own it's not that big an issue, he has plenty of utility to feel impactfull as long as he has allies to protect. The trouble is that on a fairly regular basis, you WILL be on your own. Your team isn't going to run after you when you go warding. Or at the end of a fight when you happen to be the only one left standing, or you arrive late to a fight and want to clean up the stragglers. Or you've just lost a teamfight and you're the first one to ress and try and protect the towers. There's plenty of moments in which you'l be on your own, in which case he is such an insignificant threat it's just painfull to watch.

But as said, it's more a general issue with supports than it is an issue with Braum specificly, Riot seems to design supports, especially the newer ones, specificly around the assumption that they are ALWAYS supporting, not taking into account situations in which their support skills lose (part of) their utility due to whatever reason. It's the reason that for example Morgana's shield as a supporting skill is starting becoming somewhat toxic, whereas back when morgana first came out it was not. Supports have begun to gain proper support skills that focus on actual utility, now when you prevent their utility from being applied it completly breaks the champion as that is all they are good for. In itself this is good as it makes for actual supports, but this does also require some guarentee that their utility will actually work (to some degree) regardless of the situation they are in.

Let me put it this way, let's say Duellists get a significant handicap when not fighting 1v1, for example they now only do 10% of their damage. Thematicly & mechanicly it makes just as much sense, they specialize in 1v1 situations whereas supports specialize in helping allies, so a support on his own or a duellist in a fight that isn't 1v1 are both in situations they should not want to be in as they should be at a severe disadvantage no? This currently is the case for supports, but every other class, apart from having to deal with a larger number of incoming attacks, doesn't really suffer any downside. It might not be the most optimal situations because say, they can't really deal with the incoming damage, but it doesn't effectivly reduce them to glorified minions that can do little other than flee or die regardless of what they are dealing with if they are alone like it does with characters like Braum. And that's the reason some steady low but significant damage would really help supports like Braum as it would mean they aren't essentially helpless on their own.