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.

I decided today that I’m willing to trade the minimal amount of time I spend on the Test Realm to instead leak the “confidential” information contained therein to the users here. I do think it’s important to get information on skills into the hands of players sooner rather than later so hopefully we can offer the kind of feedback that helps bring champions in line with where they should be.

So without further ado, here’s the Galio ability list!
Runic Skin (Passive)– Galio converts 60% of his total Magic Resistance into Ability Power.

Bulwark (Q) – Galio shields a friendly champion, reducing all damage suffered by that unit and converting a portion of the damage into health for himself.

Idol Of Durand (W) – Galio assumes the form of a statue, taunting nearby enemies and storing concussive energy as they attack him. Galio then bursts from his statue shell, releasing the stored energy to damage surrounding foes.

Resolute Smite (E) – Galio fires a concussive blast from his eyes, slowing and dealing damage to enemies caught near the impact point.

Righteous Gust (R) – Galio claps his wings, unleashing a gust of concussive wind that damages enemies and leaves a directional draft in its wake that increases ally movement speed.

Rammus players will either rejoice or revolt at this list. You’ll notice he gets a taunt, a nice damage reduction skill, a slow, and what could be a really fun ultimate. He’s basically Rammus 2.0 without a powerball. His passive functions similar to Rammus, though it gives him a much more usable AP stack rather than the AD Rammus gets. An AOE taunt could put this guy on par with Shen for tanking. It really just depends how well his shield works and how easy it is to land a slow -> taunt/shield combo.

As you can see from his model, he is prime fodder for the recolor skins that plague new champions. Hopefully Riot will give him some cool model effects to make skins worth the cost.