As a squishy burst champion, he was terribly outclassed by loads of other squishy burst champions. It doesn't really matter if he was actually bad or just decent; there was no reason to pick him over Annie or Anivia or whoever. As a tanky sustained damage mage, he has less competition (possibly none, really), so he actually gets a chance to excel in team compositions which would have otherwise passed him over in favor of other champions.

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I think they should add a small mana ratio to his spell flux just to round things out.

Old Ryze: Blow your huge wad, hopefully killing someone, then get blown up.

New Ryze: Blow your medium wad over and over and over from a safe distance.

Yea I agree spell flux feels a little weak now, but Q hits like a truck, is nigh on always up, and since it's always up, is always ticking 1s off his other cooldowns.

I think the ult is in a good place considering how much it does. Ryze doesn't have teh same "oomph" when you pop it that he did before, but he puts out respectable damage when it's down now too.

But yea, I think Spell flux could do with some mana scaling, even if its only like 1% cuz as is, you'll generally get more damage out of Rune Prison unless it bounces off the target like 5 times, and lvling rune prison early will keep them snared longer, which lets you hit more Q's.

Ryze is a god****ed beast now.

He's now labeled as a "caster-carry" or something similar, which means he's similar to Pantheon, except his skills do magic damage instead.

If you don't think his damage is the same as before, you're obviously doing it wrong. I can have 4-5k mana by the end of the game. This is 400-500 damage on Q alone. Combine this with the 500-600 damage from W, as it scales decently with AP aswell, you will be hitting for 1k damage in a second. Okay, now after you hit W, you're Q will be off cooldown again. and that's another 500 damage. Then we hit E, and you get ANOTHER Q. Oh, and did I mention R? Press that after your first Q, and you will kill something.

I assure you. If you're doing it right, you're going to rape several faces at once. Just don't hit the freakin tank.