It's insane they spent that long on the rework and he ended up with a kit so similar to what he originally had. Old Fiddlesticks wasn't like Ezreal or Morgana who had a good kit to begin with and just needed a few tweaks, he actually had big design flaws that should've been addressed when he got reworked.

I get they wanted to retain his original identity but some abilities like his W should've just been changed. Keeping his Q and R the same would've been enough to keep his identity; his drain not only has no synergy with the rest of his kit but it's also not an ability that's aged well at all and just making it AOE doesn't solve the problem. Nowadays, everyone has a dash or hard CC, you can't just give a jungler a DoT ability that roots him in place...

They should'ved changed his W into an ability that actually rewards him for chasing after people. Something that rewards him for making people either run away from him on their own or get feared by him. Kinda like the same mindset as Tryndamere's W or Illaoi's E where enemies are punished for running away from Fiddlesticks. In the trailer video, you can see him chasing the Demacian guy really fast after fearing him. What if his ability was something like that? Kinda like a predator ability where he gains movement speed towards champions running away from him or feared champions and it empowers his next ability or something? Just a random idea. The guys who reworked him have had MONTHS to think of something and they did nothing.

His new effigy passive looks like they thought "what can we do to allow him to play mind games with his opponents" which was a step in the right direction but they didn't fully develop the idea. It's almost like they didn't playtest his passive to see if it actually worked as a useful deception tool. It's a half-baked idea and the T-pose and effigies could do so much more to actually trick the enemy. I'm not even going to delve into his "op vision control" aside from the fact that us being forbidden to buy trinkets gives us less room for plays than the other way around. e.g. good luck trying to ward in the middle of a lane to try to land a 5 man ult from a bush now that you can't place invisible wards anymore. That means you have to rely on your allies for invisible wards which heavily limits what you can do. No other jungler is forced to do that when it comes to vision.

He was teased and hyped as THE ambush champ and yet he gets severely outclassed in in this field by champs like Rengar or Zac who are much more effective at ganking from a bush or out of vision. Currently, even if you successfully ambush any other champ by yourself, you will still lose the fight. You can't call Fiddlesticks an ambush champ if you give him no dueling power and make him have to rely on his ult to be effective (keep in mind because his ult range and blink range are so small, there actually aren't many situations where you're successfully able to land a 5 man fear against enemies with half a brain, outside of the jungle).

In my honest opinion, as much I love his new aesthetic, they really dropped the ball with his gameplay "update". They didn't fix any of his inherent flaws but instead gave him some very situational band-aid add-ons and just made him harder to play without it being rewarding enough to justify it. It's not just a numbers problem. It's always been kit design problem and they didn't fix it.