I’ve only played one game as Twisted Fate since the ult nerf, but it seems to me that it hit him pretty hard. I’m also willing to say, though, that I probably need to spend a bit more time with him to figure out the magnitude of the nerf.
Quick refresher: Twisted Fate’s ult used to be insanely powerful. It granted vision of enemy champions, slowed them all (if you don’t remember this, it was nightmarish), and allowed him to port, all on a pretty short cooldown. When he was reworked, the old Gate skill was combined with his ultimate and the slow on Destiny was removed, reducing some of the power but still not addressing the fact that global ults just stink, especially on damage dealing characters.
Now his teleport has range a bit more like Nocturne’s paranoia, still with the vision functionality. For TF, though, that ultimate isn’t nearly as good. It works on Nocturne because Nocturne is a jungler, constantly roaming, invisible to the enemy team for the most part. TF is a lane champion, though, which means he’s hopefully getting called MIA when he leaves the lane. Now granted, he can go from MIA to behind you much faster than other champions, but if your mid lane is diligent, it should be easy enough to keep his early ganking power down. The fact that he can’t jump from base down a lane now also makes a big difference. It used to be that you could pretty much expect a TF ult every time he went back to base. Now he has to get into position long before casting Destiny.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that’s a good thing, but I think at this point I think I’d rather see him get a full-fledged damage ultimate than have another teleport in the game. Either that, or reduce the range even further, remove the vision component, and reduce the cooldown by like half. As it stands, his kit is balanced around dropping on unsuspecting players, but as a lane player he can’t do that very well for the early game. He’s stuck farming in lane, typically against stronger 1v1 opponents who can burst him down at some point between levels 6 and 11 while he’s stuck running up and down river to get enough range for a proper gank.
