Olaf Changes, V1.0
Undertow
• Slow no longer decays
• Now has a minimum throw distance of 450 units
• Axes now stick in walls and structures rather than going through them
Slow decay on this ability ultimately doesn't make sense to me. The slow decaying accentuates the power of re-applying the slow repeatedly and lessers the impact of hitting the epic long range axes that seem like they should feel the best to hit. If I need to re-tune the slow numbers from here to be slightly less severity or duration, so be it, but I can't conceptually get on board with this ability having a decay on its slow.
Minimum distance is being added to this ability to limit Olaf's ability to abuse repeated minimum distance Axe throws on top of Melee range targets. Ultimately this pattern is counterintuitive, adds a lot of burst to Olaf and makes the gameplay confusing to opponents who can't even see the axe in the ground since he immediately picks it up.
The wall sticking change for Undertow actually just started as a cool thematic idea from CertainlyT, but it also happens to solve a couple big issues I was running into with Undertow. The first is that it lets Jungle Olaf circumvent the minimum distance on Undertow to preserve his fast clear by standing near a wall and repeatedly throwing axes. The second is that it strips a bit of extraneous power off of Olaf in terms of scouting (i.e. checking baron over and over with it) and sniping, which ultimately aren't very cool places for a Viking to have power, which frees him up some power budget to spend on cooler stuff.
Vicious Strikes
• Mana cost reduced to 25 from 40/45/50/55/60
• Now provides 1% enhanced healing from all sources for every 2% health Olaf is missing during the duration THIS IS IN ADDITION TO THE CURRENT MECHANICS ON W, NOT REPLACING THEM
At the end of the day, this ability feels like it should be cooldown gated, not mana gated, so I've reduced the mana cost to a fairly negligible number to reduce this ability's strain on Undertow.
The scaling increased healing effect on this ability is meant to supplement Olaf's fight-your-way-out pattern and better communicate to players when they want to use their W. It also opens up a tuning lever on his lane-sustain so that he feels less oppressive when ahead and more resilient when he's behind. I also hope that this clarifies Olaf's itemization options (in particular, opening up lifesteal items more for him), though that remains to be seen as I'm not really convinced that players plan around this interaction with Spirit Visage (same mechanic) at the moment.
Ragnarok
• Mana Cost removed
• Cooldown changed to 120/100/80 from 100
• Active duration changed to 5 from 6
• New Passive Added: Olaf gains 10/25/40 Armor and Magic Resist passively
• Active Changed: Olaf removes all disables from himself and becomes immune to them for the next 5 seconds. During this time, he gains double Attack Speed from Berserker Rage
As with Vicious Strikes, it feels crummy for Ragnarok to constrain your ability to cast Undertow and as this will only ever be used once per fight, I've just stripped the mana cost off completely.
The larger changes here are about clarifying Ragnarok's purpose and counterplay. After looking through feedback on how players perceive the counterplay and discussing this with numerous designers, I've come to the conclusion that Ragnarok is a more interesting and healthy ability if it functions as a trade off rather than a god mode. With this direction in mind, I've added a passive Armor/MRes component to give Olaf the tankiness he needs to be a front liner with no mobility and made the Ragnarok button press decision more about becoming unstoppable in order to do damage, at the cost of the resilience from damage. Hopefully this opens up the option to the opposing team to focus fire down the un-CCable monster coming for their Carry, rather than leaving them feeling completely resigned to Olaf being able to get to and kill their Carry. With this being the new decision point surrounding Ragnarok, I've scaled the duration back 1 second, as I believe that Olafs should now be casting Ragnarok slightly later in teamfights once he's closer and facing imminent CC rather than using it at the start of his approach to mitigate all the incoming damage. I also think these changes holistically add a nice side effect of giving CC-users a small satisfaction out of forcing Olaf's ult by hitting his resists, thought this is admittedly pretty minor.
