Talk:Sejuani/@comment-5077844-20141102213800/@comment-15244341-20141119160844

Sejuani is extremely weak right now because a champion's strengths need to be attuned to the metagame for he/she/it to be considered strong. Conceptually, Sej has great strengths when ideal conditions are met. Sadly, this conditions won't be met outside of very few games. Sejuani is weak against what is strong now, so she is not a strong pick or even a neutral pick. To elaborate on why your examples mean nothing:

Janna isn't weak but she was indeed weak before the ADC itemization changes. She has little lane presence early game, and bot lane was won before by the ADC which got BT first, so snowball-enabling supports were basically the ideal partner to early/mid-game ADCs. Trist works the same. She kept being buffed before the changes to ADC's itemization and, when the changes to help late game over early game ADCs came through she just exploded into an unbeatable snowbally one-man-five-dudes-with-mad-DPS champion. Zilean always was better as an AP support. Guess what. Supports now get more gold, so he can pick Tear+AUG before 25 minutes while also getting ward coverage. This is what I mean. This picks were, arguably, weak. Then the metagame shifted and they became strong. Same with Sej. She is weak now, but she could be better next season.

Also, I didn't say nothing about giving Sejuani shields or health sustain. You put those words in my mouth, since I simply stated facts about jungle sustain to ilustrate my point of armor not being any form of sustain. I did say she needs a better steroid and that is something I stand by. Basically any defensive steroid is better than Sejuani's passive, period. JIV flag gives passively (so it works when poked too) 22 armor, Olaf gets more AR+MR from just his ult, Shiv gets 20 AR+MR which double in dragon form, Maokai has an AoE 20% Damage Reduction ultimate on top of already being tankier by stats and passive alone, Sion and Naut have awesome shields which certainly trump 25 armor. Heck, even GRAVES has a better tank steroid (30 AR+MR) than Sejuani does when it comes to raw numbers. So no, 25 armor is extremely weak. The only tank that is worse off is Shen, since he does not have the energy to sustain his low cooldown shield, but the shield would actually be better if he could make use of it. Her stats aren't even impressive enough for her to live just with those through the game (Nunu, Mao) so she needs items to be as tanky as everyone else is. The movement speed debuff resistance is pointless. She has mobility on a low enough cooldown to live through any AoE slow thrown on her (since single target slows are pretty much wasted on a tank) and she can initiate from further away than basically any other champion than Sion and follow her AoE stun with a crippling unavoidable AoE slow.

Also 10 armor is not 10% less damage from physical sources. Using any simulator it reveals that at level 1, with armor runes, 9/21/0 masteries and no passive she has a 29% resistance to physical damage. With her passive activated it goes up to 34, so that's 5% at best. As you get more armor and MR, lower amounts of it lose value and give less benefits, so while 25 Armor sounds good on paper, 25 on a 250+ Armor champion is absolutely neglegible as a steroid.

Also, I'd rather never recommend any penetration for the jungle. It does nothing for clear speed that AD or AS don't. Notice, please, that machete gives an AD buff to autoattacks only. This means that having any sort of attack speed buff ups your DPS more than 8 Ar pen will ever do. Penetration is for fighting champions, which Sejuani doesn't want to do early game (she wants to 2v1, though, but at that point you basically are a CC machine and nothing else). She also has no need of getting any sort of build for late game, since she is already extremely good late game, so shoring her early game weaknesses is ideal when designing rune pages. Those runes are reserved to champions with mixed damage sources, such as Fizz or even Irelia.

I don't believe it's my reasoning that it's problematic, but your understanding of my explanation. I never said that Sej needs to lose these disadvantages. Or that they have to buff anything other than her passive. That is something that you yourself extrapolated from my explanation. I just explained why Sejuani is weak right now (S4), never what I would change for her to be strong. She needs a better passive and a different meta to be strong, period. What she requires to shine in S4 (for what that is worth right now xD) is something that is being already adressed in S5 (early invasions are harder and riskier, in-jungle sustain is improved, machete as an item caters to a wider array of champions, less emphasis on early game snowballing and more around fighting objectives midgame...). Sej will be better this time. She might not be top tier but that is not what a champion really needs to be a pick. Being solid is good enough for most people to be successful with a champion even in adverse matchups. As she was in S4, especially after the Golem changes, Sej was underperforming to other picks such as J IV, Elise, Mao, Eve or Lee which fit better with what the meta asked from their junglers.