Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-1920550-20160422050145/@comment-1330314-20160422070626

Thank you for the compliment!

There's a lot I like in the mage update, including some stuff that surprised me ( new passive works really well for him). I like that Riot's being a bit more ambitious with items, and the Hextech Protobelt in particular looks really cool. However, there are a lot of champion changes that kind of disappoint me, mainly because they look half-done: for example, there were promises to make passive feel more epic, and make  more focused on geometry with his W, but neither of that really happened, and  desperately needs a new W after her passive got changed. changes feel out of the blue, and not particularly appropriate to his theme or build, and along with both feel a little clunky. It feels like there were time constraints to these projects that forced them to conclude earlier than they should have, and I get the impression there'll be a lot of follow-up work on these champion kit changes. Overall, most of these mages will definitely be more interesting, more functional and/or more unique, which was the core goal of the rework, but many of them still don't really feel like their kit issues were completely solved, and a lot of them still don't entirely feel like their niche was properly carved out for them to become interesting competitive picks.

Regarding the jungle, I like the addition of bonus experience to the starting items, though the balance is currently way out of what. I feel the intention is to let junglers end up with similar levels compared to their laning counterparts, but currently I've often ended up with as much as a five-level lead without doing any kind of extreme farming. I'm kind of undecided as of yet on the elemental dragons: on one hand, they look cool and the random effects are strong enough to add some variation to each game, but on the other the whole random spawn thing feels gimmicky and arbitrary, and the Elder Dragon is basically Baron v2. I think this might have been removed yesterday, but I hate the globally visible buff respawn indicators on the minimap, which is just going to skew the game even more in favor of premades if it goes through. It strikes me as kind of weird that the jungle would receive preseason-level changes in an update meant to target mages, but the adjustments look pretty polished overall.

As for the items, I like some of the Hextech items, but I still have my reservations: the ice-based Hextech item will be competing directly with in both stats and functionality, and I think Rylai's will win every time. I dislike mana itemization as a whole, and while the changes will cater well to some champions, it'll inevitably end up papering over issues that shouldn't exist in the first place, and prolong frustration as a result. Whenever I went OOM as a mage on the PBE, it felt dumb and pointless, particularly since most of those times were when trying to push a lane. The changes to on-hit itemization are kind of funny (we've basically gone full circle back to ), but also good, since the stacking effect was never a good one and the Sated effect isn't something that should be always-on. I dislike and still think it has no purpose being a hybrid item, but hopefully now it'll be a little less problematic. Tanky on-hit builds are still viable after this, though, so these changes aren't going to answer the problem of tank, or any other "tanky assassin" build for that matter.

Overall, these changes are massive, and mostly welcome, but it feels like a lot of stuff was either rushed or poorly thought-out, with many glaring balance problems and bugs popping up immediately, and some changes coming out as half-baked. The update will be mostly successful in making some mages more interesting, but I feel this is inevitably going to lead to yet another rework to mana and several champions further down the line.