[2021] Some general and item-specific QoL suggestions

I'm speaking from my own opinions here, and not for the rest of my team.
1. I agree this is annoying and a pain point I have felt too. I don't know if we currently have any plans here in the short term but I'll bring it up to people to see how they feel.
2. I actually think the issue with Wit's End comes from it giving too much. At a glance, the item seems to be doing just fine, if not a little strong. But it isn't something you should be buying every game.
Exactly like you said certain aspects can be hard to feel, but adding some AD to that would just exacerbate the problem because we would need to reduce its other effects to compensate for it, or increase its cost.

1. I agree Maw feels a bit weak. Part of the issue here is that it is a very narrow item (MR items always will be). But also that it competes with Sterak's Gage, which has great synergy with Triforce.

2. I haven't personally noticed this as an issue, especially with IBG as its AoE scales with Armor, so it won't be great on most ranged champions. It will always suck to be slowed, but neither should have a very high uptime unless you are playing against an Ezreal.

3. We can try, recently Nunu and especially Brand have been on the stronger side. But how are you defining broken here? I know you are not referring to bugs, but to their power level. But I want to make sure we are working from the same point. Because as I see it the vast majority of releases have either been in a decent spot or VERY weak.

Regardless this comes with time and turning. We are getting better and learning what kind of impacts our changes will have and judging their release power.

Brand was way overpowered on his release. So much that literally all of his abilities received a nerf.

I agree Brand was released too strong, and am sorry about that, but it hardly points to a trend. Nunu as we'll was a bit stronger, but it took most players a little time to catch up to it and really get a feel for him.

These are the point I'm interested in here:

It just feels like whenever a champion is released, they're on the broken spectrum, in terms of damage mostly.....

And even after that, he's still on the strong side, picked or banned in nearly 70% of my games.

And the criteria you use to define this. Because I'd argue that he is in a fine spot now and have seen that (as the team has defined champions strength) the vast majority of our champion releases have been under power (in some cases critically). Funny enough this is part of what led to Brand's OP release. We had been releasing champions that were very weak on launch that I was ok with us risking him being, what we thought was, slightly strong. So you can imagine how sh*tty I felt when I over shot the mark, and he came out as strong as he was =P.

This is why when I talk about balance and champions being OP/Weak I want to make sure we are talking about the same thing because people will define this differently. Often times it can be tied to a champion's pick rate, ban rate, maybe their win rate, or confusing counterplay, or a particular aspect of their kit. Often times I see people talking about something being unbalanced when what they are talking about is actually frustration. This is still valid, and super useful for us to know/take into account, but it is different than what people typically think of when they think of balance (all champions have a roughly equal chance of winning and a player/team's skill is the deciding factor).

But veigar can start one-shotting you at the 10 minute mark if played well.

I think the key thing here to note is "if played well" the reality of it is that he seems to be doing much worse in high/elite level play where the Veigar player likely knows what he is doing, but his opponents understand how to play against him. Your right when Veigar is doing well he can be very frustrating, most champions with short bursty kill windows can be. In fact, almost every time I see frustration about a champion this is the case.

A cage that lasts for 3 seconds, stunning enemies hit for nearly as much time and can stun all 5 members of the enemy team, just doesn't feel balanced.

If he is stunning all 5 members of the enemy team with his W then I'd argue he deserves to win that team fight, but I agree it's very frustrating for sure. But Merc Treads, MR, and QSS go a long way to stopping this from happening. He is also a sh*t roamer, who typically wants to farm. If a player can't deal with him in lane than making an advantage elsewhere can go a long way.

On a side note, why was pick and ban phase changed?

The baning phase was changed because that was a bug. =P We didn't intend for you to be able to tell who the other team banned by looking at the grid before bans happen.