What is the initial impression?

To me, it seems like his early game took a massive hit. Instead of cheap 30 mana overloads that deal 90 to 100 damage at level 1, you get 70 mana ones instead that typically deal 70 and have less than 1/2 the AP ratio.

His bouncy actually INCREASED its cooldown from 9 to 14 seconds, and took a pretty heavy damage hit. Huge nerf to that skill.

Rune prison lost damage and duration and AP ratio (1.2 to .6) but gained mana-based scaling.



Im not sure what skill to max anymore. He certainly can't own anyone early on now with his uber-combo.

Yeah, I guess that's what they meant by having a caster dps carry. Nothing is too good early, but as you progress through the game, the overload flat mana cost will carry him to becoming a spell machinegun. Same for the AP ratio, which is **** early game, but as you get the mana regen to sustain casting every 3.5 seconds, that even it out. What to pick early? I guess overload remains the main choice, as this is the first thing you want to max out. As it gets more damage output, it keep the same low cooldown and mana cost.

EDIT: Ew, that and I just remembered that his passive is: each time you cast, the cooldown of other spells is reduced by 1. So really, as you will spam overload, the REAL cooldown of the other spells is really less than their displayed value. I mean, you can cast overload 3 times before the bounce is ready, meaning its cooldown is actually 11 seconds rather than 14 seconds. Then imagine you get the 40% cooldown cap (say blue buff + item), your 3.5 seconds is really 2.1 seconds, and everytime you cast it, you remove one extra second from your 8.4 seconds cooldown rune prison and spell flux, which in turn whenever they are cast almost refresh the overload cooldown.

This also means that the 50 seconds cooldown on his ultimate is much shorter, and will be much more spamable. Again, assuming 40% cooldown, this means that if you cast Overload and other spells about 10 times in 20 seconds, the ultimate is ready after that 20 seconds (50 secs * 40% = 30 secs, -10 seconds for spaming other spells).

Obviously this is all theorycraft, and you need some insane mana regen to sustain this, but his outburst is there, and it works in theory ^_^

Obviously they are trying to change the way that Ryze is played, I think it might end up being an improvement. The 3.5 second cooldown on over load and the mana scaling on Rune prison obviously means Ryze is going to need to start stacking Mana. Once your mana is high enough to maintain using overload all the time, ryze is going to be a harassing machine. Then all you have to do is wear away at their health with overload until you've used it enough to use rune prison and do a decent ammount of damage. Not to mention they increased his range slightly meaning he'll be more like a caster, being able to stay a little distance away from the fight rather than being a mid-ranged nuke like he was previously

I'm personally a huge fan of the change.. Ryze is my main/favorite caster pre-patch and with all the changes, I think if played correctly, he's going to be a beast... his early game was hit but that's fine.. that just means I get to sit safely and farm early game instead of getting fb every game and playing aggressively unsafe

Dont like the changes.

woot! interested if that 15% spell vamp will keep me alive during a teamfight + the new range updates

I played an IP farm with the new Ryze and found that overall his single target damage (q, and w) got a majour up once you get a tear of the goddess or something like that, but his AoE effectiveness (E and ult) have been hit hard. The Ult has a PASSIVE effect of giving you increased manna.
I'd recommend for skill build is to go
q,w,e, then max w first, putting points in ult when you can, then max q, then finnaly max e.

If you played Ryze using overload as his main spell before, you were playing him in a wrong way. Ryze will probably require a larger mana pool to do have an acceptable damage output. His early game is massively nerfed as Flux was the staple for harass. You will have to stay back and farm. At the very least they increased the range of the spells. His snare was not OP in the least before and the ticking damage was key in getting kills. The only way I see him being viable is to get Rylais, then a TON of mana items. You should spam overload to keep enemies slow. If they wanted a dps caster, they should have just created a new hero altogether instead of destroying Ryze...

I guess if you spam overload, with his passive, you can get his Flux down quickly, especially with max CDR. That could be another way to go. Mana and CDR items.

I completely agree, I've won the past 2 TT games I've played by outharassing the opponents on the bottom lane. My build was simply getting sorcerers boots and stacking saphire crystals along with some CDR items in the end.

I think its an interesting idea that Riot has by having Ryze's damage scale with mana as it reduces the need to save up for AP items that have been plaguing casters. That being said, I think they changed Ruyze's purpose with this, while Ryze can cast at a ridiculous rate (kinda like zilean in terms off spell spamming now), I found that Ryze seems to work better from a utility standpoint of spamming overload at enemies w/o mana resistance and snaring. With the change in his ult and the reworking of his other 2 abilities, I've had a lot of difficulty 1v1 anybody now. I'm not sure if that was intended by Riot considering they were trying to turn him into a carry.