So I gotta say the balance team doesn’t really need hate for this. It’s more of the design team forgetting some champions exist at all.

Galio is one of my favorite champions design wise in the game. His passive smash is a unique auto attack, his Q is pretty fun, W is really helpful, E is rewarding, and his ult is shit unless your enemy is blind.

The biggest problem for Galio is, in my eyes, his cooldowns are absolutely atrocious! He has good damage but every champion he was kinda designed to counter in some way can throw out three of each basic ability they have before he gets another rotation of his! Because of this his damage is burst with zero ability to capitalize on it unless you get ganks or your opponent doesn’t trade back. His ult is the worst in terms of cooldowns as well! Him and shen are basically 3 abilities for most of the game since their ults require another team mate in a good position or it’s on a 3 min cooldown, yet briar and other global ult champs have theirs up around every 40 seconds while also doing usually way more for the team!

The design and balance teams seem to just want to make him “tanky” which doesn’t do much since many champs now do true damage, and he can’t even do his anti mage job since most mages can just walk away from him after he uses his entire kit to wait 10-15 seconds before he can do anything else.

You can look at syndra and ekko for examples. Both have a Q that hits multiple creeps, does high damage, and is usually on a 3-6 second cooldown by 12 mins in the game. Then Galio who’s Q does the same thing is on average having a Q cool down at about 7-9 seconds if he’s building ability haste first. Both of these champions also have an easy way to counter Galio engage with a single button that’s usually up by the time he can try again, being both of their Es. And I’m not saying these champs are busted at all here. It’s the fact that Galio has been reworked and forgotten about entirely. Since they patched him to stop his support play they kinda just left him as a champ that can clear a wave and then wait to ult. And there are dozens of champs that can do it better and more efficiently and often. You can look at kasante for example.

Kasante is a champ that was designed to be a perma pick or ban champ. He can do some crazy tanking and switch to one shot almost any champ in the game without even trying. His entire kit is designed for skirmishing and fighting. And Galio has some of that skirmishing built in but unlike kasante has huge gaps between chances. Kasante can do consistent damage and poke/fighting, while Galio gets an E W Q combo and then twirled his thumbs for around 15 seconds or more.

I don’t think Galio I many way needs a rework, but he needs either a massive cool down change on everything in his kit, or to have his scaling change to being a tank. If he could actually survive a team fight for more than 10 seconds his cool downs wouldn’t be much of an issue, but if they want him as a mid mage he needs to be able to Harass more consistently and actually have better roam pressure like briar or a Diana.

You can look at Diana as a pretty good standard for a melee mid lane mage. Her q is on a nice cool down, so she can poke, her shield is up more often, and her dash is more reliable. She might not have a global ult but she can jump in fights and change a game much easier than Galio and more often than him.

All I mean to say is Galio needs something to bring him back into contention with other mid lane champs. He needs the ability to fight and not just chunk and walk away.