User blog comment:Willbachbakal/(Champion Rework) Rumble, the Mechanized Menace/@comment-1920550-20161003023000

Hum. This is extreme. By any sense of game design. And to be fair has no place in the League ecosystem. (Please don't take this as me being a dick)

Here's an issue i've recently realized is that the sucess case of extreme designs in terms of MOBA's depends on how open the base frame of that MOBA is. In League's case that frame is extremely closed: Overhead/non 3-D perspective, Auto-focused (i.e basic attacks being targeted and also a large amount of roster's spells), minimal terrain interaction (i.e only walls offer any sense of interaction), generalistic itemization and scalings (i.e a magical carry can still spec into physical damage, or a damage character can spec into tank stats) and a fairly closed battlefield in terms of terrain design etc, etc. When you have such a "bare-bones" foundation it becomes difficult to spec into more extreme choices without then falling into either game-breaking or irrelevant categories.

SMITE uses a 3-D perspective and minimal targeting (less than 10 spells in the entire spell kit of their roster is targeted and basic attacks are not targeted), which means they can have basic attack progression chains (although this is mostly on their melee gods) which deal variable amounts of damage in various forms of AOE (point-blank, cleave, even in boomerang fashion) and abilities that allow them to move around at different heights, from above a wall to the top of the entire map.

Paragon goes one step further with variable terrain (valleys, hills, etc) and with more movement freedom, such as basic jumps. This allows for characters to find more unique ways of going around their weaknesses. Case and point: Gideon, a caster type mage whose ult deals DoT in a massive AOE and draws enemies inward like a black hole. Problem is that the ult is a very long channel that holds Gideon in place and any CC can shut it down. Useless ult by itself right? In comes Gideon's E, Torn Space which is pretty much a Bard portal that can be casted anywhere (even in mid-air). From a hidden position Gideon can teleport to a high vantage point over the enemy team and carpet bomb them with his ult while remaining outside of their range.

What all of this means for your Rumble rework is that your design choice is too hyper focused and strips too much base power from Rumble and leaves him too restricted in terms of damage aplication, mobility and defense. No matter how you twist it, your version of Rumble will have no way of even trying to defend himself from an all-in or a gank. Things like Jayce, Poppy, Naut, etc can bully him to the ground with their CC. Junglers like Elise, Nida, Lee can chain gank him. If normal Rumble already struggles with this, your Rumble will pretty much become a 300G snack bag to them.

That being said, and not to say these are all negatives, with a tweak or two this is killer kit for a DOTA 2 hero, since they have a trend of making characters with minimalistic spells, several passives and hyper-focused niches and they have non-linear, more affinity-based scalings, so really good job on that end. Under that framework, your gameplay iteration could flourish 100% no questions asked. But simply not under League's more closed and conservative framework.