Every game I play with Gnar points towards the Yasuo situation.
On Yasuo's release, his win rate was also sub-50%, and that's because idiots abounded with him, and very few people played him optimally. And then rito made the dumb decision to buff him, despite admitting that he has the Lee Sin issue. What's that you may ask? The Lee Sin issue was when Lee Sin was released, he was mechanically challenging for a higher reward. The problem was people didn't know how to mechanically play him, so people weren't reaching his full power. To compensate for that, rito has the dumb idea that they need to buff champions like this so that people will continue to try to learn the champion until enough people know how to play them, in which case they nerf them, often below release values. Lee Sin still had high win rates because his numbers were bonkers, but Yasuo didn't, so they initially buffed Yasuo because people were not reaching the "expected reward" of Yasuo play. Rito then said they will nerf him later when people become more accustomed to him. They ANTICIPATED him becoming overpowered at some point, yet they still felt the need to buff him in the short run.
Now, the question is, WHY THE LITERAL FUCK ARE YOU BUFFING A CHAMPION YOU ACKNOWLEDGE HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BE OP BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE TOO STUPID TO PLAY HIM OPTIMALLY!? It'd be like, "oh, little Timmy over there is having a bit of trouble there shooting his targets with his rocket launcher, let's give him a larger rocket so that he can hit the targets, and then wait until he hits them often enough to then give him the smaller rockets again". Seriously, if you can't play mechanically at the level necessary to reach maximum reward, that does not mean it needs a buff so the rewards are more rewarding. It means back the fuck off and let people sort it out. The power is there, the knowledge isn't. Don't give more power because of lack of knowledge, give more time.
I'm getting a little sick of rito's decisions. I like Gnar, but I don't want him to become flavor of the month because rito couldn't wait to see him become flavor of the month, so they artificially accelerated it using buffs.