The fact you max out E makes me think you never played Varus.

Edit: Shooting E then auto attacking does not result in automatic detonation of blight. Learn the champion before commenting.

If you know how to play Varus...it feels good. Learn what his E does, you will enjoy Varus more.

Don't care if I'm double posting I guess I'm going to have to spell it out to GD why his E is so important.

Varus' other abilities detonate Blight, dealing magic damage equal to a percentage of the target's maximum health per stack. Maximum damage capped at 360 against monsters.

Blight's description says his other abilities detonate blight.

Varus fires a hail of arrows that deals physical damage and desecrates the ground for 4 seconds.

Now read carefully. Yes his E slows, but it's not that that makes it so useful. It desecrates the ground for 4 seconds. So for every second your enemy is standing on it, you can auto attack and Blight detonates automatically. I can't tell you how many times I've used hail of arrows when I am right next to someone and watched their health melt over that 4 seconds.

I personally think that his W should be able to proc itself if after reaching maximum stacks you land other 2 or 3 more autoatacks.

itd be another vayne if it procced itself. and yes in most cases u DO max E first. maxing Q first is very unreliable and throws off your dps by a lot early game which will work against u in fights.

The fact that the skill is a ''charging'' type makes it a use for sniping and chasing runaway enemies.

With the base damage bonus on W as well i feel like he has good incentive to constantly be trying to AA poke in lane(especially with frequest AS bonus while csing and above average range). If you are playing like this, then it transitions quite cleanly into an E for cc/heal debuff and proc if they don't back out quick enough. There is also the travel time on e which(depending on your AS can let you get an extra AA before it lands). All in all my bot lane fights tend to be something like AA AA E AA etc with a Q near the end for snipe or burst depending on circumstance. For teamfights i don't worry as much about the E procs near start as my position/cc but still proc it enough to do a lot.

Anyway, if you are not complaining about his balance, I don't see any issues with there being tradeoffs for playing slightly different.

I know what his E does. It's not the point. The point is that the choice making for triggering W stacks always feels bad. As I said in OP, you lose damage on Q and more often than not, E and R are better used for utility than for blight damage and more often than not, at the beginning of the fight.

On one hand, you want to keep your abilities ready for triggering blight stacks and on the other you want to use those abilities for their utility.

You will rarely get both optimally and you will always wonder whether the other choice might have been better and you will always feel like you wasted something.

Sorry. That's not how it works.

For a second, I was like, "Oh wow. That's cool."

Then I tried it. And nope. That's not at all how it works.

Good try though.

That's not how E works. You only trigger blight when the ability lands on the enemy.
Desecrated ground means reduced healing and slow.

Also, even if it worked the way you said it works, that's not the reason to max E. You only get damage and increased slow from it. As I said, the ability optimal to max first is completely dependent on the lane. For example, if you are facing Caitlyn/Sona, you will want to max Q first, because you will need to farm and to not allow them to harass you unpunished.

I honestly don't think it is ever optimal to max Q first. E has quite a bit of AoE damage from good range if you can't stay in range to AA(probably only an issue if your support can't stop sona from harassing you nonstop). If you can stay in range to AA w is going to make csing the easiest. Q scales quite hard off of AD anyway so you can use it to AoE farm if you need without leveling it.