Morello
Alright - again, thanks for your patience. We've chatted a bit about Warwick, and I'll try to lay out what we see the problems, concerns, and our direction we'd like to take while fixing things to bring him up to date.
Let's start with what's holding Warwick back, currently;
He has weak pre-6 game presence: Because of the reliance on his ultimate, Warwick's ability to make plays, gank, or finish a kill is really poor until he hits 6.
He has a very flat pacing that disallows skilled duels, which keeps him weak: Most reasonable Warwick builds have enough cooldown reduction to keep W up almost all the time, spam Q quickly (and E, of course, is a passive). Over time, this has lead Warwick having few levers for us to adjust and make him have both a satisfying and balanced place in League.
Blood Scent is only helpful if Warwick is ahead: Since the skill is passive, and conditional on the enemy being low, this thematically-great skill doesn't make a lot of opportunities for fallback patterns or make ways to outplay an opponent.
These are likely the first places we'd look to fix with him. Next, where do we envision Warwick living in the game, and what should he do?
Warwick should be a staple in the jungle: Warwick has historically been a jungler (and for a lot of older players, THE jungler!), and we think this should be where he primarily lives. His lifesteal focus is easier to balance there, and could be used to make for strong counter-jungling safety with the right adjustments.
Warick should be a consistent, sustained lifesteal fighter: This is largely what he is now, and I don't see any need to change that identity. I think details will need to change to bring him up-to-date, but the identity is a fine one.
I'll give you some very initial thoughts on what direction we'll take. I'm not going to comb details much in this thread (that's going to likely be handled by someone on the team!), but just give you an idea what we're thinking.
Improve Blood Scent and improve pre-6 ganks: This is a pretty cool skill in the way it sells "hunter," but mechanically, it needs some work. This skill is also the first place for us to look in ways to add new decisions (which will show more/less skilled play between players) and enable pre-6 ganks so he can actually perform his job as a jungler.
More wildly adjust numbers, especially cooldowns: The lack of pacing spoken to earlier will need to change if we want to buff Warwick. Even other fighters like Jax or Irelia have windows of downtime that more knowledgable players can capitalize on to turn engagements. Without this, we can't really up Warwick's power much - this will be a part of it. It may also include mechanical tweaks on skills like W, E, or his passive.
This likely won't happen for several patches: While we agree something needs to occur here, we do have bigger fish to fry before we do this. I'd love to get this out after World Finals patches are stabilized and we can focus on more opportunistic work like WW.
I'm sure there are some unanswered questions, so I'll try to get to what I can.