His laning is still the same, until his dunk goes cooldown, he'll become less scarier than Garen.

His teamfight is still the same, unless you got baited for 12 secs. Yeah teamfights would not last that long to finish one by one, but if you can make Darius' ult went CD on teamfight, he's pretty much sandbag.

This is a good change.

I can think of no other big boom nuke ult that refreshes and has the potential to NEVER go on cooldown all game. It's pretty silly to have a true damage nuke always available. They changed Garen's and Riven's execute ults to be less readily available, did you really think that Darius' wasn't on the radar?

It opens more counter play to him. If you see him ult, try to wait out the 12 seconds. It adds strategy and timing to the Darius player. His ult was always low risk high reward. That's just not right for a true damage resetting nuke.

I think most Darius players are overlooking the fact that this could open him up to buffs. I'm ok with the nerfs for that reason alone.

This is how his kit was intended to be used.
It was being abused, much like Yi and Trydamere.