User blog comment:Centuriarch/Raiden, the Ace of Shades/@comment-7709681-20140915025056/@comment-24036535-20140915192306

The silence part was me changing his kit mid process and overlooking something.

Yes, that is exactly what the passive does, it removes the "luck" aspect of crit based gameplay, making his damage consistent. I didn't want an assassin who could 100-0 a full armor tank if he got lucky, but fail to kill a squishy if he didn't.

The point of his gapclosers:

Q: Main gapcloser, damage barely scales out of laning phase.

E: E was meant to be for skirmish use mostly, as 1 second of invisibility isn't much, and neither is a 25% movespeed buff, it was meant to be less a gapcloser, and more of a reposition.

R: 300 range gapclose, he needs to be in almost melee range to use this on his target, essentially, it is used with his Q in case the enemy can get some distance.

Raiden was overall intended to be a crit based assassin, with super fancy auto attacks in a sense. While having large bursts of mobility, which he cannot sustain for long, since he has the manage his Fade stacks, and his Q is his only reliable gapclose, while its range is mediocre.