A Tiny Master Falls

By Helmight

Presumably by this point you all have at least had a chance to play with Veigar following his changes. I think it's safe to say that Riot did not, in fact, give him compensatory buffs. Instead, they took a champion that was already not very popular and nerfed the crap out of him.

Before the Veigar changes went through, I already knew that his E was going to get nerfed. Simply put, Event Horizon is an ultimate-level ability with a basic ability cooldown and mana cost. If Riot wanted to put power into Veigar's kit, they would have to change something about his E. I was okay with that, in all honesty. Nerfing the E, but giving him more safety or damage would be a fair tradeoff in my eyes.

Instead, what we got was a net nerf almost across the board for the Tiny Master of Evil. Event Horizon become a nigh-unusable ability, going from a mere .5 second cast time to a whopping 1.25 second cast time, with warning particles. Unless your enemy isn't paying attention, getting a stun is all but impossible for Veigar to achieve.

This is a huge issue for Veigar, since it's his only way of staying safe. Unlike other immobile midlaners, Veigar only has one option to keep himself safe, and it's on a 14-second cooldown. If he misses the ability, or uses it prematurely, or has to use it to peel for himself, he's worthless in a teamfight. Veigar has no survivability outside of Event Horizon and no other reliable way of keeping assassins and tanks from turning him in mincemeat.

To make matters worse, Veigar also lost .2 off his ultimate's ratio, which at this point is just adding insult to injury. The Q change was arguably a buff if you just looked at it on paper, but in practice it's a net nerf as well. Adding additional range to the ability and letting it double-down on CS doesn't make up for the fact that Veigar needed the ability's reliable damage in order to pull off his burst combo.

And to compensate for all these nerfs? Minor buffs to the mana cost and cooldown of his W. Thanks Riot, you've been a big help. 

Now, I would have been okay with the changes if Riot had said, up front, "we're nerfing Veigar because of (X)." It would still be an unnecessary nerf in my eyes, but at least we'd have some kind of context about why it happened. But the fact that Riot is trying to call the changes "compensation buffs" is why they rub me wrong. These are objectively not buffs, and Veigar's winrate after the changes will attest to that.

I don't think Riot's necessarily wrong for nerfing Veigar. I don't think they're trying to enforce the mobility metagame that Veigar counters so well, nor do I think they're "evil" for changing one of the least-played champions in the game. But I do think that Riot needs to seriously evaluate both how they communicate their changes and what changes they actually make to their champions.

What are your thoughts on the Veigar nerfs? Let us know in the comments below!