User blog comment:JmLyan/CCC5 - Alyssa, the Origin of That Which is Round/@comment-1330314-20140910054936

Thoughts:
 * Origin Orb is an interesting item concept. It's unfortunate that you can't use it to work as a red trinket, but it's still an interesting way of using Alyssa's orbs as a resource. Its interaction with Alyssa's abilities, however, is bizarre: considering Origin Orbs is your warding trinket, you wouldn't want to pick it up with Orb Barrage. Any kind of 3000-unit movement ability would have to be tied to an ultimate-level cooldown, yet you're allowing Alyssa to do this potentially every 6 seconds. A long-range get-out-of-jail-free card sounds nice, but this wouldn't be fun for anyone playing against Alyssa. Finally, Gather's effect on Origin Orbs is piddly, considering it only makes the orb deal up to an extra 80 magic damage. It's also an effect you wouldn't want to have, again since Origin Orb is your vision trinket and you wouldn't want to dislodge it as part of your combat rotation. You need to completely rethink Origin Orb's interactions with Alyssa's abilities.
 * Magic Orbs is a nice way of pacing Alyssa's damage, though the scaling is a bit off: while 1200 sounds good for an ultimate, the AP scaling on your Magic Orbs is crappy compared to their base damage: an average AP nuke has a base damage of ~240, but when dealing that much base damage with your orbs you only have a  scaling. You should decrease the base damage of your orbs a little, and significantly increase their AP scaling.
 * Orb Barrage has a lot of serious issues: first off, the wonky mana curve means you have to spend 150 mana early on to deal the damage of any other mage's basic nuke, but end up being able to spam this ability later on without any kind of a downtime. The targeting is ill-defined, so there's no real indication as to which orb you're sending out, and the static cooldown means that you'd just bombard any close-range or melee champion without giving them a window of opportunity or a way of fighting back. The self-orbiting mechanic looks interesting as an anti-melee ability, but it's not very meaningful when you can already harass melees out of range with blue orb infinispam.
 * Spherical Form looks like an interesting repositioning/dive tool, and I think the initial cooldown might be a bit too large when taking into account its tiny rank 1 range. The Magic Orb spam, however, seems unnecessary, especially when you already have so many ways of spamming orbs.
 * Gather's a nice area denial/orb repositioning ability, though the interaction with Alyssa in orb form makes either Gather or Spherical Form's dash redundant.
 * Arcane Cascade looks unnecessary in a lot of ways. There's no real reason to have another ability that generates orbs when you already have extremely good orb generation on your basic abilities, and its interaction with Gather basically means that even if you miss Arcane Cascade's aiming you can still burst people for 1k+ base damage every 4 seconds. Its existence makes Orb Barrage and Spherical Form more or less redundant, so it would be better to find another ultimate.

Overall, what's missing is the capability to expend Magic Orbs. You have three different ways of creating Magic Orbs, no set duration on them, and no real cost or downtime to using them, which means you end up with a champion that has no windows of vulnerability and spams balls everywhere 24/7. Unlike, who has to manage her orbs somewhat, there's no real management aspect to Alyssa's orbs. She has no real weaknesses, lots of redundancy in her kit, a lot of lopsided numbers, and no clear gameplay role. It's a shame, because you have a lot of tools in your kit that work really well together: Alyssa's orbiting Magic Orbs make her a good anti-melee champion, and being able to turn into a Magic Orb herself and dash through enemies with her orbs still orbiting her sounds like a great combo. You could, for example, turn Alyssa into a dive bomber mage if you made her ult explode all her Magic Orbs for double damage instead of creating new ones. Instead of being a Syndra lookalike, you could turn her into a reverse Syndra (close-range mobility + AoE instead of long-range immobile single-target damage).