The old Maokai was a competitive staple for multiple seasons in pro play. With the recent rework, Maokai’s role in a team changed quite a lot despite only one ability being changed. But did it have a positive or negative effect on him? Is he still relevant in the pro scene, or even solo queue? In this article, we’ll evaluate these questions by going over the good and the bad of the rework and how effective Maokai will be going forward.

The Good

For starters, Maokai’s passive had a small upgrade as it became a cooldown based passive as opposed to a stack based passive and heals for more as well. Thanks to the cooldown based passive, it became easier to proc during the laning phase as you don’t risk losing the charges as you lane. This ensured that Maokai would be able to stay in lane for longer even if he is low on mana. Additionally, the buff of 7% maximum health healing to the current 13% late game is also quite significant as that adds another 100-200 health healed every passive proc during late game teamfights which may become the difference between a win and a loss.

Apart from the passive change, the rework also gave Maokai some small buffs to his Q in the form of improved mana cost, slow, and cooldown, but another big change came in form of his E. For starters, they took the percent health damage from his W and transferred it to his E, which, on its own, makes his Saplings more threatening even when Maokai is built as a tank. Along with that, his E received some small buffs to the slow, mana cost, and cooldown as well. Overall, these changes helped Maokai with his overall laning phase and damage output so it was quite welcome.

The Bad

While the buffs to Maokai were nice and welcome, he was hit with some hard nerfs from the rework. For starters, his W was completely gutted, as his damage changed from percent health (moved to E) to a low base damage and his root duration was gutted (2 seconds at rank 5 all the way down to 1.4 seconds). On top of that, the cooldown stayed the same while the mana cost was raised at later ranks (75 all ranks to 60-80). Riot effectively made it pointless to level your W until last.

And then we come to the ult. Riot took one of the best ults in the game and replaced it with a slower, weaker Nami ult. At first, when the change to his ult was announced, most Maokai players were skeptical but open to a change. However, it’s clear that Maokai’s new ult is a complete travesty and simply doesn’t fit how Maokai was played.

Overall, the nerfs to Maokai were simply too much and were part of the reason that Maokai is in the current state that he’s in.

Overall

While the buffs Maokai received in the rework were nice, the nerfs made a much bigger difference. The overall rework moved Maokai into the support position, but as Maokai was continuously nerfed due to his power in the support position (E duration in bushes changed from double base time to additional 2.5 seconds per 100 bonus health, for example), there was nothing redeeming about him to justify playing him in other roles. A huge reason for this was the change to his ult. While most tanks have ways to buff their tankiness through abilities, the reworked Maokai lacked that. Because of this, Maokai has lost all relevance in pro play and most of his relevance in solo queue.

How to Fix

In my opinion, there are three ways Maokai can be fixed which I identify as the easy way, the Riot way (the most likely way Riot may try to fix Maokai) and the unlikely way.

The easy way: The simplest way to fix Maokai’s problems would be to revert the change to his Ult and tweak the numbers as needed. Riot has shown that they’re willing to do that in the past with Kog’Maw’s W. This is by far the simplest way to fix Maokai as the power of his old ult will allow him to stay a pocket pick at worst. But at best, it may allow us to see the return of Maokai to pro play.

The Riot way: The most likely way for Riot to fix Maokai would be to buff his base stats and his Q. Through this, Riot could transition Maokai from a pure tank to an AP bruiser. This would allow Maokai to become a great solo queue champion even if he doesn’t recover the relevance he once had in pro play.

The unlikely way: The least likely way that Maokai would be change is for Riot to add some defensive buffs to his W which would incentivize maxing that ability second again. However, considering the nature of Maokai’s old ult, it’s unlikely that they would be willing to put a defensive buff to one of his abilities unless they resort to the easy way of fixing Maokai.

Conclusion

While the Maokai rework brought some interesting changes, both good and bad, it’s clear that the bad heavily outweighed the good. Maokai lost his ability to be a pure tank in teamfights, and continuous nerfs caused him to become a bad support as well. While there are ways to fix this, Maokai is currently stuck in the bottom of the champion priority list simply due to how weak he is at the moment. It’ll be interesting to see how Riot will fix this as the season progresses and if Maokai will return to the level of relevance he once had in previous seasons.

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