User blog comment:Willbachbakal/(Champion Rework) Sion, the Undead Champion/@comment-6016076-20140618235325/@comment-1330314-20140622015620

Thank you enormously for such detailed feedback! Pretty much everything you pointed out I agree with: from the look of my base damage and ratios, I likely went a bit overboard with the damage, and buffing the health gain in addition to removing the health cost might make his mid to late game a little too crazy. Regarding the Siphoning Strike analogy, the Q damage can technically be augmented through armor penetration/reduction and CDR, but armor pen/reduction items are not something Nasus typially builds, and even with 40% CDR the damage is periodic, whereas the above health is constant. I'm also a little concerned with the utility: I replaced a lot of Sion's steroids with utility such as the slow resist and revive, and I don't know how well I'm gauging the power of those effects (especially the ultimate)

On the subject of my kit being feast-or-famine, I'm inclined to agree, in the sense that Sion is still heavily dependent on his Q to stick to targets. However, I think kiteability should be his major weakness, and that the slow on his Q would provide far healthier and potentially more effective sticking power than his current stun, which is even more feast-or-famine: currently, he's in the situation where he's either within super-close (550) range of his enemy and auto-wins, or isn't and is useless, whereas with a skillshot Q he can attack targets from a much longer distance, at the cost of reliability. I don't think the cooldown is that bad (it's 8 seconds, which is Sion's current Q cooldown at max rank), but the reason it's that long is mainly because of the uptime on the slow, which can reach up to 3 seconds. At max CDR (not recommended, but possible) that means there would be only 1.8 seconds of downtime on the slow, assuming you landed the ability once, and any shorter would go into perma-slow territory. I could reduce the slow duration and the cooldown with it, but I don't want Sion to be too good at poking either.

I don't think the example of Mundo holds: he's pretty much the opposite of feast-or-famine, mainly because he doesn't actually have real scalings to his damage. There's an AP ratio on his W, but that's it. The only other scalings are his passive and ultimate, which both scale with health, and his ult is free enough to be used for infinite lane sustain. I think there are a lot of problems with Mundo, among them a lack of scalings and counterplay, but the main trouble is his ult: it gives too much free healing, and only exists because of Grievous Wounds, a mechanic that itself has little gameplay to it. If you happen to run Teleport instead of Ignite, you'll effectively lose your lane to Mundo past level 6.

New Skarner is fantastic, and quite healthy, but doesn't really function in the same way as Sion: current Sion and my own Sion are designed to be tanky and deal damage, at the cost of mobility, which is going to be prone to situational differences, whereas Skarner gets a lot of natural tankiness, mobility and CC through his kit, along with terrible scalings, so there's a much smaller difference between a successful Skarner and an underperforming Skarner than a successful Sion and a starved Sion.

While I'm still not quite sure as to the functionality of the ult, I don't really want it to be that much of a source of sticking power. The problem with current Sion is that his enemies are practically guaranteed to die once he gets in melee range. I want my own Sion to be scary at that range, but I also want to give his opponents every opportunity to try and escape. Having three consecutive slows along with his Q on the above kit would practically guarantee a kill on mages and other squishies, and the unconditional revive means it risks being used as an escape, or at least not in a situation where Sion's attacking an enemy. The reason I wanted the condition to be there was so that Sion would have to dive into the fray to make the most of his ult, but also be rewarded for it with a resurrection. While it's sort of feast-or-famine in a solo situation, it wouldn't be in teamfights, as your initial hit essentially marks a target for your team to kill so that you can tank even better.