User blog comment:Emptylord/Blogs/Time-themed abilities/@comment-5514182-20131220064303/@comment-8100976-20131222214158

@Emptylord:I dunno, free vision sounds pretty wonderful to me, especially given the current warding system. Not to mention if one is sitting in bottom lane trying to zone enemies (something I think we all agree is major feature of Zilean as-is), leaving a bush and having a few extra moments of sight is quite powerful. I actually don't see Zilean as being 'mad' anywhere I can think of though I must agree that the 'Seer' bit of his lore is otherwise unexplored; potentially an interesting place to draw inspiration for support-y abilities.

@Willbachbakal: I'm just sure I agree with Poppy's passive being equally as complicated. Poppy's passive (and correct me if I am wrong here) is more powerful the lower her current health, the less total health and more resistances she has. This means she's deceptively harder to kill the closer to death she is; the problem with the passive from my understanding is that players on both sides of Poppy can never feel the power of Valiant Fighter as it's very subtle and not very clearly worded. But does Delay Doom suffer from that? I really dunno. I think if it was visually/sound cued well that it would be obvious pretty quickly what it does. Now what those cues would be? Maybe a clock ticking, maybe a number counter similar to time bomb? The problem is you will always have someone who is oblivious to cues unless those cues are giant, loud and clanging; and even then!

As long as you don't take something iconic and defining away from the kit I don't think you inherently have to follow that rule. Kat is an example of that I think in her rework. If you hold to that rule though it seriously limits what you can do within Zilean's design; afterall, Zilean's design is extremely straight-forward and was made fairly early in the life of League. His style effectively is Haste-Time Bomb-AA, or Haste-Time Bomb-Rewind-Time Bomb-Haste only really broken up by the occasional ult that sometimes is completely wasted by a person focused elsewhere. I feel in a lot of ways Zilean's entire kit is going to go on some level just because of the limitations involved regarding power.