User blog comment:Poisonshark/Custom Champion: Red, the Bird Demon/@comment-25235491-20160227110454

A few edits are in order, so that at least he looks balanced. Thank you very much for your contribution.
 * Here is the article on essence. Just so you know, Essence is capped at 10.
 * Q just deals double magic damage. I thought listing the same value twice would make people think "Redundancy GO!".
 * Essence is gained naturally. Once again, see the article. I'll add a link to it in the post so people won't have to read the comments.
 * I agree that the damage on Q might just be too strong on champs, but it does little to minions. 300 base damage is XBOXHUEG, but this also is Red's only form of damage that involves minimal risk, and considering he's melee and cannot deal with ranged midlaners aside from this, maybe the balance is here? Once again, the mark is mostly balanced by the risks Red takes, considering he goes to do a melee attack (though 175 is on the high end of melee) to apply the mark in the first place. The damage might need to go down because of his sheer advantage of being manaless midlane.
 * The question of picking Red over Swain deserves its own point. Swain's close range is offset by his "on-demand" ultimate, but Swain's ultimate provides tankiness and sustained damage. In contrast, Red is squishy and blows up near-instantly since he has nothing like Swain's heal from ult, but he has great sustained damage during his ult, but while Swain revolves on sitting on his opponents for quite a while, Red needs to blow them up ASAP to get his passive reset going on. While Hunting Dragon is way less reliable CC than Swain's own (despite looking very much like Swain's Q), Red is focused around damage and that reward once he gets in. So Red is riskier than Swain (because of the attack range and squishiness) but brings far better cleanup abilities with his higher damage.