Gragas

Gragas is a melee mage who spends most of the game not being in melee. Barrel Roll travels from far outside the trading zone, detonates on your command, and cuts the attack speed of everything it catches, which quietly deletes the damage of a marksman or an auto-attack bruiser. Body Slam throws you into the pile and slows the landing zone, and Explosive Cask pushes everyone back out of it.

His real signature is Drunken Rage: it costs nothing, refunds mana, adds attack damage and, more importantly, cuts the damage he takes. Stack that with Happy Hour, which heals him every time he casts, and you get a mage who is far harder to kill than his item build suggests. In exchange he has no hard crowd control at all, and his ultimate can rescue the exact target your team wanted dead.

His poke range is indecent for a melee champion: you drop Barrel Roll onto the enemy wave and shave health off without ever stepping into their range. Drunken Rage turns short trades into a trap, because your opponent does the math on your health bar and not on the damage reduction you just drank. And Explosive Cask is one of the few tools on this roster that can cancel a full engage outright, or peel an enemy carry away from its bodyguards.

The flaws are real. He drains his mana bar early if you throw the barrel every time it's up, and Drunken Rage does not cover that on its own. He has nothing that locks a target in place, so anyone who decides to leave simply leaves. And a badly aimed ultimate damages your own game more than theirs: a carry knocked far away is a carry you saved.

Max Barrel Roll first and play the detonation timer, not the impact point. You aim where your opponent will go once they see the barrel, then trigger it manually when they get there. Against a laner who has to step up to last hit, land the barrel behind them instead of on them: they retreat into the explosion instead of away from it.

Drunken Rage goes off before the trade, never during it. The drink is time you spend doing nothing, and an attentive opponent will use it to reset the tempo. Against someone who commits on you, the clean sequence is drink, Body Slam to stick them in the slow, then the barrel at their feet. Keep E as your escape against ganks: it's your only movement tool, and it goes nowhere useful if there's no target to collide with.

The first spike is your ultimate level, and not for the damage: it's the moment you can unravel a dive or throw a jungler back out from under your tower. A Gragas holding his cask changes how the enemy team approaches your lane, even if he never fires it.

The second comes from his first large power item paired with some resistance, because Gragas only works if he survives the trip in and back out. The turning point is when Body Slam stops being an escape and starts being your team's engage. The third spike is accumulated cooldown reduction: the gap between two barrels is the difference between showing up in a fight and watching it.

You don't start fights facing the enemy carry, you start them from the flank. The most reliable pattern is to come in from the side with Body Slam on whoever is closest, immediately drop the barrel on the group following you, then use Explosive Cask to push the enemy back line toward your team and never away from it.

That rule decides your whole value: the cask is a positioning tool before it's a damage spell. Fired from behind the enemy line, it herds their carry into your allies. Fired head on, it launches them out of reach and they'll still be thanking you at the end of the game. Defensively the same spell splits a diver off from his support and makes a lost fight playable, provided you didn't already spend it chipping a wave.