Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-1876049-20160511183024/@comment-1330314-20160511225642

I've been doing well! Best of luck on your thesis! I took a gap year in college and have that to look forward to next year. What's yours on? What are you majoring in? By the way, if you look farther down on my wall in one of our previous conversations, I did the marksman bios (Ashe, Draven, Vayne and Sivir, plus Jhin for good measure).

And yeah, I've caught myself moving all of a champion's damage to a single effect probably a bit too often right now. Honestly, I think a lot of it boils down to circumstance (most of my recent reworks were on supports, with whom removing most ability damage was a conscious decision, marksmen, whose damage mainly comes from autoattacks anyway, and mages who specifically run on a singular element, namely and ), though I've often caught myself mentally "nudging" my concepts towards being manaless or concentrated around a single effect when that shouldn't naturally apply to them.

With that said, I think there's merit to concentrating a champion's damage around fewer effects. One common instance of design I personally dislike is when a champion receives what I'd call "filler damage" on one of their abilities, i.e. damage that doesn't scale with the stats the champion builds (a telltale sign is usually a dummy AP ratio), that isn't the main reason for the ability's existence, and often isn't even the champion's main damage type (e.g. magic damage on a physical damage champion). and have filler damage, for example. This is usually done to give some incentive to rank up a one-point wonder ability, particularly if its cost increases with rank, but the end result is that a champion ends up with damage that doesn't feel impactful, even early on, that doesn't achieve any real purpose, and in some cases uses up power that could be much better spent elsewhere.

One of my goals is to only give champions damage that feels meaningful at all stages of the game, and concentrating that damage into a single effect often does the trick, imo. It's not a solution to everything, and I should probably not try to apply that solution to most mages or fighters, but I think it's worked well in the cases I selected, or at least most of them. In the cases of a few Enchanter/Cleric-type supports, namely and, I deliberately moved all of their damage to their autoattacks, and I think it could help solve a lot of their current problems: Janna, for example, had her tornado charging mechanic nerfed repeatedly due to how its damage risked giving her excessive poke and waveclear (her W is also held back by being both point-and-click and a nuke), and part of why Soraka's so annoying is because she can poke from a safe distance while healing her partner in lane. Removing their ability damage would force them to get closer to their targets to damage them, but when in combat range they wouldn't feel completely defenseless, and could pack a pretty decent punch even though their overall damage would be really low.