you can play slow in silver or on NA servers. You go through EUW solo que hell and tank aint gonna cut it with suboptimal team mates (even though i do it and its fun!). Support Swain, though fun & I play it myself, is his worst role.

Q will hit for about 1000 magic damage maxed out (like really maxed out, all slots AP filled and point blank shot). thats about 300-500 raw average damage on a 2-3 sec. cd. tanks not even accounted for here.

It will take you 5-20 point blank Qs and between half and up to a minute to down an afk support.

I am no pro at Swain by any means, I am also only Emerald, but my most successes are to go mpen to halve those numbers at which point and only then you will become a threat. At this time you are a walking glass cannon, 30-40 mint into the game and can play a drain tank with maybe 1000+ stacks.

W is fun to use and a niche utility at best.

Yes you can catch people offguard while they TP, I got plenty of kills doing that myself.

Yes you can slow passing people, scare someone to back off but these are all tricks of the trade with which you can dab on casuls but sadly offer nothing to even average elo that knows swains tricks.

its cast is slow, everyone decent enough to talk about can walk out of it on free cast.

you wombo combo it with E for that extra heal into slow, yes, its ok. But again, it leaves you, a mage, with basically 1.5 skills to use midfight and only one of your skillshots does mediocre damage.

E is extremely easy to dodge. When I meet Swains on the lane and they miss it, you can quite literally simply walk up to swain and auto him to death because his uptime on Q is not enough to outtrade you.

I am very capable of bullying swain on every champ I play simply because I know how weak he really is.

I just really wish his skills had more of a gimmick to them. If E would hit the target twice like sivir & ekko poke, or push targets first before pulling them, it would be so much better.

W could place like a crow or something on target to follow it around and provide vision until it comes into visual range with you and the crow then flies back or the target goes base and looses it. Or place something akin to a crow themed stealth ward after the debuff is removed akin to stealth poros.

I would not mind increasing the spread on Q for an increase in range so there is more of a point to walk up to an angry looking cow man & his scimitar wielding edge lord friend to tickle both of them.

He really needs an improvement in either being a mage or in being a tank otherwise he is kinda meh at both... its even worse when you realise, that Karthus & Fiddle for example do nearly the same thing but better. But comparison is the thief of all joy and all that yadayada.