User blog comment:Telaruhn/Aldric, The Elder Guardian/@comment-1330314-20140406044245

Your concept is really well-designed, and has a lot of fantastic ideas! Having a support being able to shield allies on-demand as well as peel for them makes for a strong support idea, and you have a lot of great mechanics for a tank (he's got a good initiate and free defenses). Your kit does have a few flaws, mainly due to redundancy between some abilities. Here are my thoughts:

Guardian's Seal is a fantastic passive for a support, and immediately makes your champion a good peeler. The only issue I would find with the ability is how it stacks: having your shields stack just means you can simply pile defenses onto an ally, and using all of your spells in a short span of time would create a 440 shield on a target, with potentially the rest of your team being shielded for 330. While this is not bad in itself, this means that this is an edge case you're going to have to balance against, which also means your base shield would have to be mediocre because you can just use it all the time on anyone you want. A better solution would be to give this a cooldown and a different system: for example, Aldric could be able to shield allied champions with his abilities, but shielded champions wouldn't be able to receive another shield from Aldric for a few seconds. This allows Aldric to lay down clutch shields, and potentially stronger ones, but also give his opponents a clear window of opportunity to charge in when his defenses are down. I also think you should be able to let Aldric shield himself with his abilities, if he can't already.

Sacred Hammer is a fantastic peeling ability. Nothing to criticize here, other than you don't need to specify that enemies are stunned, since they're already being knocked back (unless you're stunning them after the knockback).

Safeguard has quite a few issues: the first is that it renders the target immune to basic attacks. While this in itself isn't necessarily bad, it conflicts with his passive: Aldric will already be shielding his target against damage, so he doesn't need to give damage immunity on top of that. The other issue is that it prevents Aldric from attacking: again, not necessarily a bad thing, but Aldric is a tank on top of being a support, so he'll tend to be on the front line trying to attract the attention of the enemy team by hitting at them. Basically, this is an ability for a back-line/caster support like Soraka or Sona, and not a frontliner like Aldric. The third issue is that Aldric gets to both shield and heal his target, which is itself redundant: heals heal against damage and shields protect against damage, both at the same time make your target near-impossible to kill, which may be good for your role but super-frustrating for your enemies. Since your champion's all about peel, saves and initiation, i.e. aggressive play, I recommend you rework this ability into something other than a heal, which on top of being redundant due to his shield would encourage him to play passive, not a fun to play with or against when your champion has a lot of active peel. You may also want to find another name, as is already an ability name in 's kit.

Inspire's passive is fantastic for both a support and a tank. If a champion could make perfect use of this passive, it would be yours. The active is also good, but the bonus defenses are again redundant when taking Aldric's passive into consideration: sure, the resistances synergize with the shield he'll be laying down with this, but that's just piling tankiness on top of tankiness. What this means is that you'd have to either balance these so that they wouldn't be overpowering together, which would lead to individually mediocre bonuses, or make them individually strong, which would make the shield + resistances combo far too powerful. I recommend you keep the AoE damage and have Aldric shield all nearby champions (including himself), which is already a great ability. If you feel the active is missing something, then you could always have Aldric grant something like double the movement speed bonus from the passive to himself and affected allies, regardless of directionality (which would make for a very strong initiate). As with Safeguard, Inspire is already a name for an existing champion ability (for ), so you should find another name.

Sanctuary has the potential to be a great initiation tool, but I feel its mechanics are misplaced: jumping to an ally is good, but you already have a lot of peel, and while your champion is meant to save the life of his allies, piling on too many abilities with the same use just means he'd end up overpoweringly strong at one single thing and be lacking in all the rest. The 100% damage reduction is a part of this: it's redundant due to the shield Aldric can deploy on allies (which he'd be doing with this), and would also potentially have some weird issues with true damage, which ignores all forms of damage reduction. The utility the shield gives is essentially a team-wide ultimate, which even with the huge cooldown is too strong. The knockback is good for peel, but not actually that good for initiating when you're a melee tank. I actually suggest you reverse this ability's functionality, which would also preserve most of its use: have Aldric jump to the target area and pull all nearby enemies to his location, dealing damage to them. Not only would this preserve his initiation capabilities (he'd be able to pull in priority targets), but it would also allow him to peel, as he could use his jump to pull enemies away from his allies. That way, you could also reduce the ability's cooldown.

All in all, your champion has a well-defined role, a strong core, great flavor and overall good to amazing mechanics. On the flipside, he has a lot of redundancy in his kit, and has too much power placed into peel and not enough into initiation. You've got a great design overall, and with a few tweaks he should be amazing. To reiterate, here are the modifications I suggest:
 * Give Aldric's shield a cooldown for each individual allied champion before they can receive one again. Aldric should be able to shield himself with his abilities if he can't already.
 * You don't need to indicate Sacred Hammer stuns targets, unless you're stunning them after knocking them back.
 * Safeguard needs a redo and a new name. Guardian's Seal is already a great source of peel and this ability would just overload Aldric with single-target defense. Try making it a way for Aldric to shield an ally from a distance, or turn it into a tank-oriented ability.
 * Inspire needs a new name and could do with losing the bonus resistances on its active. Aldric dealing damage and shielding allies is good, and if you want a secondary bonus you could have it interact with the passive movement speed boost.
 * Try changing Sanctuary from a massive peel ability to a powerful initiate by having Aldric jump to a location and pull nearby enemies towards him while dealing them damage. It can still be used to peel, and would be a better ability for a tank. You would probably have to change the name as well.

Best of luck, and congrats on the great concept!