User blog comment:Degritone/Zero, the Machinegun Mage/@comment-1330314-20141102100831

You have a strong central theme for a high-speed DPS mage, and quite a few interesting mechanics, but your champion also has serious implementation problems that could easily be fixed, namely his complete lack of base damage.

While I understand that Zero's starting attack speed of 2.5 is there to work with his passive, overly high innate attack speed lends itself to on-hit effect abuse (with or, for example, even when factoring in the wasted attack speed). While it's okay to give a champion above-average attack speed for them to do well with on-hit, past a certain point you'll just make those on-hit items far too effective and harm your champion's itemization choices, since those items would become practically mandatory. This was a problem in Season 2 when on-hit was far too good, and the only successful marksmen were the ones who could accommodate a full on-hit build.

Generally, a healthier way to reinforce a champion's theme through their stats is to encourage them to build certain stats through really awesome scaling. For example, you could have your mage turn into a proper machine gun over time as he builds cooldown reduction and attack speed by having both stats work really well with his abilities (his passive would really encourage building attack speed, if he wasn't maxed out on it already).

As a side note, for some reason you're having Zero gain magic resistance per level. Ranged characters, even the tanky ones, don't gain magic resist per level, so you're going to need an extremely good reason to add some here.

Point Zero is a really good way of making your autoattack-based mage powerful while also involving a fair amount of counterplay (you need to stick to your target before you unleash hell on them), but again its implementation is bizarre. Having Zero's autoattacks start out slow doesn't really add any interaction (they're going to hit their target anyway), and would just make last hitting even more painful than it would already be with him (hitting for 7 base damage on an autoattack that travels super-slowly would make last-hitting practically impossible). Having buffed autoattacks deal on each hit would be far too powerful as well, as with Zero's current stats you'd end up dealing  damage per second. A better way to implement this would be to just give Zero normal attack damage, attack speed and autoattack projectile speed, remove the per autoattack limitation, and instead have Zero gain a massive burst of attack speed for a few seconds after a set amount of autoattacks (3 is usually a good number).

Before going into each individual ability: your cooldowns are far too high. For a champion whose schtick is being a walking magic machine gun, his core damage-focused abilities are on a 18- and 9-second starting cooldown, respectively. While a lot of your champion's power is autoattack-based, even autoattack-using mages like and  have damaging abilities on far lower cooldowns. Another issue is that your abilities have no base damage: you could be dealing literally zero damage with Zero Flare and Zero Barrage, which is not acceptable. The AP scalings are also far too high, even if they compensate for the lack of base damage: it would be a lot better to just give your abilities (and your passive) some base damage, even if it's weak, and lower your AP ratios, which would allow your champion to ramp up damage in lane and have a more stable power curve. Your Q and W actives are also a little bit too similar, and need to be differentiated a bit more so that each can have a role beyond "deal tons of damage in this direction".

Having Zero Flare charge up before unleashing damage is a good way of telegraphing the spell. There's not much to criticize about its gameplay proper, though I think you should keep the amount of beams shot constant, as well as the channel time, while also keeping a fixed AP ratio, adding some base damage, and significantly lowering the ability's cooldown. Zero Flare won't scale as hard, but would be far more consistent. Also, your mana cost is way too high (you lose almost half your mana bar for an ability that's pretty weak early on): you should give this ability a fairly low mana cost and have it increase per rank instead, which would also work with Zero Barrage's passive.

Zero Barrage's mana restoration is a good idea, as it encourages him to autoattack, but would be better if your abilities were a lot more spammable, as you'd then have a minigame where you'd blend autoattacks with spells to lay constant pressure while keeping yourself topped up. The second passive that causes you to lose mana, however, is not a good idea: while this may have some tie to his theme or lore, it carries zero positive gameplay and instead turns Zero Barrage's active into a chore, where you're forced to cast it to avoid ruining yourself in lane. It has no interaction with your opponent, it doesn't foster new gameplay, and just turns what could be an awesome harass and farming ability into busywork. The active itself is cool, but a bit too similar to Zero Flare (your attacks even pierce through enemies, for some reason). The mana restoration also rewards you for not hitting your opponent, which coupled with the ridiculous mana cost scaling makes the ability punitive for all the wrong reasons. You should try finding an active that accomplishes something different from Zero Flare, but should also give it a slightly higher initial mana cost and have it increase way less with rank (10 extra mana per rank is already a significant increase). You could also reduce this ability's cooldown.

Zero Nova feels out of place in this kit: your champion's all about releasing massive amounts of magical power, but then you have this spell that turns him into a pet champion who, for some reason, is a bit more effective against other mages. If you want a spell that diverts aggro from Zero (and then again, why do you want an ability that diverts aggro?), there are ways to do so that would fit his theme better. Outside of that, the mana cost is far too high at all stages of the game, and its non-constant duration would make it hard for enemies to gauge when exactly the Nova Sphere would disappear. You'd be better off redoing this ability and saving the idea of droppable turrets for another champion.

Zero Hour has a good idea behind it (turn into a bullet hell boss for a few seconds), but again its implementation has severe issues: aside from the prohibitively high mana cost and unwarrantedly high cooldown, your ability causes your champion to essentially kill himself on several different levels: first off, becoming stationary will guarantee that, even with 700 autoattack range, massive tankiness and a damage steroid, you're going to get focused and will likely die while ulting. That you also take massive amounts of true damage for every hit you take means that, even if you do manage to quickly kill someone while ulting, you're still almost certainly going to die because 200 true damage per hit means that, at level 6, any champion can bring you from full health to 0 in just four hits (this is also not counting minion aggro, which here looks like it would trigger your ult). You need to throw out the parts of your ult that punish Zero, and instead find a way to give him a steroid that makes him really powerful for a short time and allows enemies to fight back, without going so far into extremes.

You have a strong theme here, and I think you could actually take this further and turn Zero into a proper bullet hell boss: you could have a champion capable of unleashing a non-stop barrage of magic damage that would require moment-to-moment positioning to evade, and a moveset that would mimic traditional bullet hell game attacks (Q would be a laser with a charge-up time, W could be an organized barrage of mini-projectiles erupting from Zero, etc.). That aside, your kit has good core ideas, but they're brought down by serious implementation issues: your champion has an unplayably weak and unstable early game and an overpoweringly strong late game, along with weird stats and a ton of mechanics that punish the player way too hard, often for no good reason at all. First off, punishing players for making bad plays is generally not a good idea, but if you really do want your champion to be high-risk, then a better way to implement this would be to encourage your champion to put himself at risk, and reward him for succeeding: there would be no real need to implement punishment here, since failing a risky play would typically involve losing a lot of health and mana, and potentially dying.