A new rework of Rammus has just arrived to the PBE and I’m hyped. Not only has Rammus been one of my favourite champions, I’ve also felt like he needed something new to his kit for a while. In my opinion he has lately been starting to feel like a very plain and boring champion, similar to how many people felt about Warwick before his rework. So this rework will be welcomed by me.

His new passive isn’t very different from how it was before, but at the same time it kind of is. The passive is changed so that it scales less from armour and the passive will also make your basic attacks deal magic damage. I think this is a good thing and you will see how well his passive will synergise with his overall kit when I talk about his other abilities. I think the change to the armour scaling was made because his abilities have changed so that he won’t just want to build armour. So you will be able to build him in many different ways instead of just going flat armour. This is good since it gives him a higher skill cap and also makes him more interesting.

Rammus’s Q has been tweaked a lot but not really reworked that much. One of the changes is that the movement speed now starts as not as much on lvl 1 but will be a lot more at max level. Before, the movement speed bonus was always at 155%. Now it will go from 145-235%. This will make him go very fast. At full build you can expect him to go at about 1000 movement speed. This change will make him a monster at ganking in my opinion. I mean a ward won’t help you from running away from the jungler coming from a bush when the jungler is going at 1000 movement speed. The collision detection size has been reduced so that you don’t hit minions on your way to something else. As an old Rammus main, I know that the detection size can sometimes be hard to play around. This will make it feel smoother to use his Q.

The cooldown has been reduced by four seconds at max rank. I think this is a bit too much considering how strong I think this ability will be. I mean, having Rammus going at about 1000 movement speed every 6 seconds will be difficult to deal with. There is another change that may make up for this. The ability now is a channeled spell, which means that it can be stopped by spells that interrupt channels. So champions that have abilities like this can be great counterpicks to Rammus. The duration of the ability has also been reduced by one second. This makes it so that the escape with this ability isn’t as great as it could have been and it will be better at engaging then disengaging since you won’t have your movement speed buff for as long. The damage has been lowered which will kind of make up for other buffs to his Q. It also makes sense since most of his damage I think will come more from his other abilities. The spell will slow more but only for one second now instead of the two seconds before. This will make it harder for others to follow up, but you will be able to hit your taunt easier. So I think this has been made to make you taunt easier to hit, not that it was very hard before. If you land your taunt, it will of course be easy to follow up.

Credits to @MisterIKMS on twitter.

The new W is one of the things that has changed the most. Before it would give you more flat armour and magic resist while activated. Now it will give you 20 flat armor and magic resist plus a percentage of your armour/magic resist, scaling per level. This will make you an absolute monster late game. I mean having 70% bonus armour is A LOT when you have around maybe 600 to start with. So if you want to build defensively with him, you will still want to go for armour. This will make you pretty much unkillable.

The cooldown of the ability has been lowered from 14 seconds to 6. In my opinion, that is too much. Before you would have to really think about when to use it, but now you will be able to use is very often. It will be really obnoxious to face. They have tried to make up for it by giving Rammus a self-slow by 60%. This might make the ability worse to use while running away from someone while at the same time wanting to get cover from damage like it could be used before. Just like with the Q though, the ability will still be great while engaging. A great strategy would be to Q in, then taunt and land then just W. This will force them stay close to you. You won’t have to worry about being slow since your team will just be able to follow up and totally lock down the enemy. Your movement speed will not be needed. I mean you’re just standing still and letting you and your team kill the enemy.

Another thing that just helps him in these situations is that you now can toggle off the W early. So if you kill the enemy and then you need to run away, you can just toggle off and you will have all your movement speed back. As an addition to this already great ability, his passive will deal 150% damage and the passive damage will do damage back to enemies that auto attack him (similar to how it was before). So when someone basic attack you during this ability, they will get damage reflected back based on your armour since that’s how the passive works. So during his W, he will do loads of damage.

The E has also been changed. First of all, the name has been changed to “Frenzying Taunt”. The biggest change is that it will now give you bonus attack speed while activated. So, with the combo I talked about earlier (Q-E-W), you’re not only now going to do more damage with the passive plus the W, you will also be able to proc your passive a lot faster with the attack speed. You’re now going to not just be tanky, you will also do a lot of damage. The attack speed buff will also refresh while other spells are active. So if you do the combo, the attack speed buff is just going to keep on refreshing since your W will constantly be active. If you play Rammus this way, you will be extremely good at initiating while still being very tanky and doing tons of damage. A nerf to this ability is that you no longer reduce the target's armour.

The new ultimate is what I think might make him great at split pushing. The damage has been reduced by a lot but it doesn’t make this ability bad. When this ability hits an enemy, it will now slow them for 1.5 seconds, stacking up to eight times. This will make this ability useful when you have to escape, since the ability has enough range that you will slow the enemies chasing you. This makes up for changes to the other abilities that made them less useful while escaping. Having an ability that can slow this much will also be useful if you are split pushing, and the whole enemy team suddenly appears. This will be very useful for this since it does AoE damage. The slow effect will also be good if you haven’t killed an enemy and your taunt has ended. You will then be able to slow them with your ultimate and chase them down. Another great thing for split pushing is that the R will now deal double damage to structures. Obviously, this is great for shredding down towers when split pushing.

I think the new Rammus will be great for both jungling and top laning. His ganks will be better, since his Q is so much faster and you can slow the enemy with your ultimate. His sustain in the jungle will also be great because while he is getting a lot of armour from his W, his passive is also dealing more damage at the same time and the cooldown has been substantially lowered. He will be good in the top lane because he will split push well and he will both be tanky and do damage. This will make more match-ups viable for him.

Builds for him will of course still involve a great amount of armour. They may also involve some attack speed now because you will want to have a lot of attack speed to proc your passive as much as possible while using W. Something like BotRK might give you exactly what you want. Trinity Force might also be a good choice because of the HP, attack speed and mana it gives you. You might need some more mana since you have lower cooldowns and your mana will be used more often.

To sum it up, I think Rammus has become a more interesting, more useful, and more fun to play. I will definitely try him out a lot when he comes out.

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