It’s no secret that the last several champion releases have been heavily overpowered. The working theory was that Riot was trying to encourage sales by releasing strong champions and then slowly nerfing them back to reasonable levels. There are a few obvious reasons that’s not the case. For starters, Xin Zhao and Vladimir have remained relatively unchanged and still sit at the top of their respective role lists. Then there’s Galio, who bucks the trend with a completely mediocre presence in game.

From the Champion Spotlight, you’d think Galio is meant to be a tank. His passive – converting a percentage of your magic resist to ability power – also points that direction, but only his shield skill is great for tanking. I find Galio a bit more like Morgana, though people have also called him Nunu 2.0. The big problem with Galio is that building as a tank means your damage output is minimal, even with his passive, and his ultimate is easily countered by stuns.

Galio feels just about right around the level 5-12 range. His Q and E skills hit hard enough to deal reasonable damage and the laning phase is just about perfect for his ultimate – not enough people to interrupt him. Beyond that point, though, he feels extremely vulnerable. His ult can actually be a bad thing. Consider your situation – you ult, causing 3-4 champions and whatever creeps are nearby to attack you. Granted, you get some beefed up resistances, but if you miss your shield or the shield wears off, you take a good bit of damage through there. If someone interrupts that ult, you have 3-4 people attacking you and there’s very little you can do about it. The speed boost is nice, but it’s not going to get you out of that situation.

As you cruise toward late game, you start to feel the pain of your MR stack. Your abilities aren’t doing much damage and they’re on a fairly long cooldown. By this point the people you taunt are blowing through your shield quickly and giving you some hefty damage for your trouble.

This isn’t to say Galio can’t be useful – he can. I think he’s best placed as a support character like Morgana. If you have a solid tank Galio can be good for getting your carries into position or even helping Amumu close the gap for bandage toss. Also, you don’t necessarily have to make use of your passive, even though it would be nice to. Galio has pretty solid AP ratios, so building for magic penetration could actually yield some interesting results.