General Discussion/Off-topic - Page 925

1) He is a very weak laner. His moves have relatively high mana costs and his passive really doesn't save him in lane because to sustain Q he has to be at low mana and can't cast other spells. He can't trade blows because his W is useless without E in lane, and casting W-E puts you down about 150-200 mana, which just makes you lose your lane even harder. Unlike Annie, Veigar has to level W and E to get the same utility that Annie gets out of her passive and W. This means he simply doesn't have the mana pool or the damage to lane effectively.

2) Long cooldowns. W, E, and R have cooldowns that are way too long. My main issue though is with his E. I understand it's an AoE stun, which can be potent, but unfortunately its cooldown is so long you only get one in a teamfight, and because his W is so dependent on his E you essentially have to wait for his E to come back up if you want to reliably hit someone with darkmatter.

3) Relatively high mana costs (W is 100 @ 1, E is 80, R is 150). I don't mind R having a high mana cost, but W and E are way too high at early levels imo. Although with his new passive (explained below) it might be best just to leave them how they are, or nerf them and reduce his mana gain on his new passive. To be brutally honest Veigar's laning is so bad even with a high amount of mana sustainability he would probably be perfectly fine (he has no abusive health regen like Vlad/Nid/Swain/etc.)

4) Early enemy merc treads. Veigar really has to go R > Q > W > E if he wants to have damage that is comparable to other casters in the game right now (think Annie, Swain, Brand, etc.). However, this means leaving E at lvl 1 for a long time. Merc treads eliminates his ability to reliably land darkmatter because people break out of his stun and simply walk out of his W.

Solving these 4 main issues will bring Veigar much closer to contention I think. Here is how Veigar should be fixed imo:

1) Change his passive. I absolutely HATE his passive now. It really feels like a sort of band-aid for his poor design. This is what I think a good passive for him would be: "Veigar receives 8% of a target's health in mana after killing them and 4% for a champion assist." This works in multiple ways to relieve some of his issues. First, it helps him lane much more effectively because it gives him a method to regenerate mana even when he is close to full mana, his passive now takes too long to kick in. Second, it gives him a little bit more lane control because it allows him to more easily spam dark matter on creeps knowing he'll get roughly 36 mana back for melee minions and 23 mana back for ranged creeps (at low levels). It does not necessarily relieve his weak laning, but I don't really think it's possible to do that unless you want to completely change Veigar around. I don't mind him having a weak low level laning phase as long as he can actually itemize defensively and keep his mana up (because right now you simply can't buy anything that isn't mana regen or flat mana at the start because if you go into lane without any health pots you're asking to get completely destroyed). This also allows people to use a more diverse rune page and mastery setup knowing that he won't be as dependent on mana during the laning phase. During teamfights this means that Veigar can get away without having to buy flat mana (this passive kind of acts like Veigar's old ultimate that gave him mana return). As long as he is getting kills/assists he is getting his mana pool replenished which means he essentially gets a temporary mana pool buff while fighting. This allows the player, again, to somewhat forgo getting flat mana. Right now I have noticed that if I rush DFG I have absolutely no sustainability. I use my ult and poof, no more mana pool, and I just kind of run around (to be fair his run animation is OP so it's ok).

2) Give darkmatter a mini-stun before it lanes. The idea here is that as soon darkmatter is cast a small black hole type animation appears with the same size as darkmatter's AoE. If an enemy champion walks into it (or if W is cast right on them) before darkmatter falls they are mini-stunned for 0.2-0.4 seconds depending on its level. This does a couple things. First, it allows Veigar to more easily get his stun off and adds some difficulty to his play, meaning that if you cast W - E you need to re-apply the stun with E before they break out of the black hole stun. This should require some fast fingers and would be pretty fun imo. Second, it removes some (not all) of darkmatter's reliability on E. I want this move to be set up in a way such that you cannot hit an enemy with W if you simply place it on them (even if they don't have merc treads). However, if an enemy walks into W after it has been cast they should have a higher chance of getting hit (again mercs would help with this). So this means the possibility of reducing W's mini stun, or making it have a little bit longer fall time depending on how it plays out in game.

3) Reduce his cooldowns on W and E by 2 seconds and his ult by 10 seconds at all levels. His cooldowns are simply too long right now.

These 3 changes would do a ton to give Veigar a place on a competitive team or even in ranked games.

It might be best to just start out with a few of these changes and see where it takes Veigar, because all of these at once could possibly be overboard.