User blog comment:Rowtuh/Boiler, the Disjointed Automaton - Remake 1/@comment-69.165.137.140-20121219003617/@comment-1618239-20121219020034

Very perceptive. I appreciate and mostly agree with your comments, especially where you pointed out the sustained CC on Overflow. You didn't mention whether you'd enjoy playing him though, despite all of the commentary!

Below I have comments about what you say, and comparison with the pre-rework version of Boiler to note previous ideas that didn't work.

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Q1/Overflow. I pretty much agree that this is significant. Other champions with long-lasting ("persistent") slows include Sejuani (hahaha), Urgot (shield), Zilean (warp), Ashe (dat ashe), Dr. Mundo (always be cleavin), and with some itemization champions such as Singed and Karthus. Obviously, we're not talking about itemization (at least for this part of the kit), so let's go over the other two general categories.

In some of those instances, such as Ashe, Sejuani, and Zilean, they sacrifice damage in their kit in order to gain persistent soft CC and bursts of utility. Obviously, Boiler doesn't fit in here - he does a lot of damage over time, and doesn't have much utility besides a small team shield.

For others, such as Urgot and Mundo, it's always single-target, and they have unreliable methods of applying the CC - for Urgot, his shield isn't always on, or his E+Q isn't always happening; for Mundo, if he misses a cleaver, the cleaver train stops happening.

Boiler currently suffers from only very minimal forms of these problems. He's closer to Mundo in the way he slows - it happens a lot - but he doesn't have cooldown problems.

I feel like the slow should be reduced to a duration of 1.5s, and the cooldown maybe increased to 5 seconds at max rank. A 2s 65% slow is extreme (Mundo slows for 40% for 2s). Another option, which perhaps should also be taken, is to reduce the % slow itself - as mentioned, Mundo's is 40% and single target; perhaps a 45% 1.5s slow of 5s cooldown would be more appropriate (remember that the slow scales with levels).

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R/Inflict Boils. I feel that the damage output on this is only a problem in concert with the immense durability that it grants. To compare:

Amumu

Boiler

The base damage goes from 8..24 to 30..60, which is probably reasonable since the ability has a full 2 minute cooldown (it's no "I-can't-ult-for-three-minutes" Galio though). It seems like a remotely relevant argument that the base damage is over twice as high on the ult, when Despair is a basic ability.

What's more problematic is that percentile damage:

max health to damage ratio current health to damage ratio

As we can see, the base percentile is between 3 and 4 times that of Amumu's damage. This is where Amumu starts to wreck people lategame, so this is a very significant concern. In design of the ability, I felt that the fact that it deals current health rather than maximum health, as well as a 2 minute cooldown R instead of a toggled basic ability, validated the choice to triple the "damage output." I also felt that this validated the doubled AP ratio. And the significantly increased AoE. (And, again, I didn't feel that the base damage was significant enough.)

Those were probably all valid... but then the ult also granted immense defensive stats, and that's where things started to go wrong. Maybe valid with a bit of tweaking.

Later in development, the final pin in the coffin of that level of damage scaling probably came when - in quick succession - the W was changed from reflecting one attack to gaining a shield, and the W granting continuous defensive and movement stats to all allies, and the ult giving Boiler a massive number of W refreshes.

So... definitely needs to be looked at. I like that it has an AoE current health damage aura and I like that it helps your allies too, but it should definitely only do so much. Maybe increase the cooldown, decrease the base percentile damage, and make the W cooldown 3 seconds without cooldown reduction. I don't think the AP ratio needs to be changed - it's current HP and that pretty much averages out to dealing 1/2 the damage that maximum HP would deal.

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Passive text still pretty complicated, still not a fan of it, you're entirely right.