People upset about the damage nerf to Ryze's ult are upset over the wrong thing. AP provides most of your scaling and damage there anyways. The real nerf came from the range reduction of Arcane Prison, which imo went a little too far.

There are enough counters to arcane prison in the game, and given that ryze charging towards you or entering the brush pretty much tells you what he is doing, a shortened range on this ability is devestating to what is already an underpowered hero by mid-late game. Ryze does not farm well, so he does not make much money if he does not kill, and the reduced range on prison (which did not have that large of a range to begin with, at 600; is 550 now i believe), makes it even easier for the opposition to react. He almost makes me think of an evelyn without the stealth component now, since his ranged attack does not have that large a range either at 425. For comparison, Karthus has 450, Veigar has 500, Zilean has 600.

I'm not arguing with the people that say he is rather one dimensional, as in... I walk up to you and smash you and have no skillshots. This is true =p. I'm just saying that Riot has made it overly difficult for a hero with one of the slower base speeds of 300 to do the only thing he does, kill heroes.

I feel that this post is spot on. the nerf on Ryze's ult's damage was much needed and i welcome it, even as a Ryze player. But not having Rune Prison at 600 range is completely obliterating my game. The main use of this skill comes with the fact that other ranged characters (Ashe, trist, etc) have so much range that it is hard to keep up with their damage output as ryze in the first place, so I use to to get a few extra shots in and make sure other players know not to mess with me. Now I can't even get the much needed shots in that keep me going through a game. the only thing this range reduction did was make it that much harder to retaliate as Ryze making the character a flat out shooting target for ranged characters.

Playing vs Ryze as Ashe, it hasn't seemed like Ryze is having to horrible of a time. A good flash or ghost and I still get tripled skilled to death from Ryze.

I've been playing Ryze a lot recently, with mixed results. The flash or ghost changes a lot, but then you get into the situation where he needs to have flash or ghost, which is bad.

whole concept of how this champion has worked has needed to be totally reworked for a long time, but does anybody listen? no. does anybody have the innovation or balls to do something about it? apparently not.

the biggest problem for how ryze worked before was that rune prison is point/click/root form a decent distance. after that, you get a bukkake of magic damage that you simply cant avoid unless you blow some kind of summoner spell, or have an inherent blink AND can blink to safe distances (or you dropped 4k on mr).

so what they did to change that from being so stupidly easy, was reduce the range on rune prison. now you REALLY have to position yourself right, and if you get caught by rune prison, its much more likely that you could have done slightly better at maneuvering away.

has this changed ryze much at all? slightly: he actually has to try just a bit and understand spacing and everything that can HAPPEN in that spacing before charging in. understanding maneuvers is about as much skill as it takes to play ryze right now. is he every going to change into something more innovative and actually cool? i doubt it. i severely doubt it.

I am on the side that this nerf is justified. Ryze's range before is just silly. In a 4v4 or 5v5, the person caught in Rune Prison is guaranteed to die within the next 3 seconds. As someone who main a support character, this is enormously painful. Every time a team has Ryze in it, I will die 3 seconds from the start of the fight, because he can out range me trying to heal my own team from the back. There was no way to counter it, since all CCs have shorter range than that.

He's still a 1 dimensional character, and his play style is just too predictable. I don't think he needs a buff--he needs multiple way to attack someone, so that he can be of more use to the team.