LoL: Is Galio Okay Now?
Galio has recently gone through some changes by Riot Games. They wanted to give him a few more item options and make him a bit more bruiser style in general. Since these changes Riot had to touch up on his stats quite a bit so now the big question arises. Is Galio Fine?
Starting in Patch 14.6 Riot did a few changes to Galio that should affect how people play him. Galio players used to buy Lich Bane even though they went for a tanky rune with Aftershock. Riot was not a fan of the big goliath building full ap so they changed some of his ratios to make him more of a Bruiser champion.
They intended for Galio to build Riftmaker and maybe some HP items instead of just full on passive empowering AP.
So did the changes work? No. Galio Players were not happy with the changes and continued to build AP to fix the fleeting relevancy of the champion. Now with the nerfed ratios he was worse than before.
So in Patch 14.7 they gave him a few more buffs to his base stats and base ratios which allowed him to clear waves faster and in general deal a little bit more burst damage.
Is Galio Where Riot Wants Him?
Definitely not. With Patch 14.8 they are buffing Galio again now giving him the elusive 5 move speed buff that has been proven to make many champions broken. They are also reducing the cooldown of his Q which is his main wave clear and poking ability.
It seems that Riot is now taking a more drastic approach to make Galio the anti mage that he is supposed to be while also giving him the capability to roam around the map better.
Galio isn't bad by any means, but the champion is mostly played by mains and one-trick ponies and still has a negative win rate at the moment. This is usually a bad indication because it means that players with a high mastery are still not performing well on the champion without new players dragging down the win rate.
After the buffs his win rate will definitely go up, but we can only speculate how big the 5 extra move speed are. In the past these have proven to be the best changes for some champions and Galio will certainly benefit a lot from them.
Currently, Galio is still a burst champion that relies on sneaky taunts and follow-up combos to quickly take out enemy champions. It would need some more drastic changes to make him into a drain tank or even an AP bruiser. Especially with his empowered auto attack passive Lich bane just feels way to good and Shadowflame helps with bursting down combo-ed targets.
Galio suffers from the fact that in Season 14 everything is incredibly fast, and he is unable to reliably hit big taunts in the late game and brawl for longer periods. That is why player still go for Burst builds that can work on any range with his Q. Maybe Riot should just give him back his Flash Taunt since the new Neeko Ult is basically the same ability but better.
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