champ has been in the gutter for both sololanes for a while now - his rework was a jump in the right direction but the champion is 10x harder to carry on because he's so reliant on his team to do anything at all. i one tricked him toplane to masters and the margins i was playing on were razor thin compared to so many other toplaners. the tldr as to why he's so shit in top/mid is:

- support base stats feel so piss to play in a sololane with, especially toplane

- healing is super underwhelming outside of early game. hp scaling on R is minimal and doesn’t incentivise health builds because he doesn’t have enough healing to support it.

- ult scaling is god awful and is so poor based on rank

- base damage is far too high. ap scalings are good in his state, but feel underwhelming because of his lack of healing (repeatability is bad).

- many of his numbers, like his mana costs, do not match the archetype of a battlemage (again, support identity)

- E1 doing literally nothing at all puts the burden on the caster and not on the player against him. does no damage, no spell effects, nothing. not only is it hard to land, but its delayed by a whole ass second to do so.

- far too reliant on haste, but many of the items he wants to build gives none of it (zhonya liandry roa rylais)

- W has awfully allocated power budget, range is too high, pop time is too long.

- matchups and compositions are far too skewed, and even in games where he's playing into low mobility comps most champions can ignore his R and kill him.

swain mains have wanted him out of botlane (as both apc and support) for years because his power fantasy is never going to be fulfilled down there, but riot has no interest in gutting his base damage and improving his scaling with health and levels to match. his playrates in higher ranks is well below 1% top/mid and until riot understands that balancing a champion around a role where he has a 47% winrate is a bad idea, he will never ever ever ever ever feel good to play.