User blog comment:Willbachbakal/(Champion Concept) Skjold, the Shield Warrior/@comment-5088437-20130121012350/@comment-5088437-20130125010853

Gonna let that opening slide because I know I've had some difficulties communicating.

Now, this is from my perspective, it is a double resource management. Rage fuels both cooldown reduction and is the cost for abilities. So rage has a double effect on those abilities. This is very different from Tryndamere, who doesn't require rage to use any of his abilities. Now, I agree there are some parallels with Shyvana. However, cooldowns are still the primary resource drawn from.

Perhaps my choice of words 'double layered resource management' was clumsy, but effectively, you have to concern yourself with the cooldown offered by your rage as well as the cost of those abilities in rage. This represents two different resource types (cost and cooldown) which are both affected by this single resource. You are, in essence, managing both resources by spending or not spending rage. I thought you alluded to this in an earlier post, but maybe I'm wrong.

I know its possible to reduce cooldowns such as Graves & Xin Zhao, but those are simple reductions, perform an action, get a reaction. The mechanics implied by this scaling CDR seems a bit more complex, kind of like Trynd's rage to crit you mentioned earlier. It has to constantly update itself, making cooldowns increase or decrease and refreshing the number as you move thru combat.

That makes this champion's abilities unreliable, as even a split second can matter in tight plays. Looking at it from a design standpoint, I think its too much and could be dispensed with without losing much depth on the character. You'd still need to land abilities to generate rage to fuel other abilities, but if you miss, you're only out that rage, not that rage and cooldown.

As for snowballing in lane concerns, this champion may start off with a single ability, but it won't stay that way very long. Additionally, in top lane at least, trades happen quite often, and they'd happen in bottom lane, too. Probably not to the same degree as top, but still. So I'm not seeing the point you're making here, especially since Skjold, with a single ability at level one, can deal ~161* damage to a champion (without factoring in masteries & runes). This will also net 20 fury, plus any additional fury gained from the damage taken in trade.


 * The Math on that 161 for verification.  Q1 - 40+(23*.4)+29.5 = 78.7  Q2 - 40+(31*.4)+29.5=81.9.  Q1+Q2=160.6.  Depending on where rounding occurs in abilities, this could go up to 162.  By comparison, Lee Sin's Q combo only does 100+6% missing health, and Volibear's Frenzy only does 160 damage when the target is at very low health.  Most other abilities available at level one which do more damage are either channeled/dots (Fiddlestick's Drain/Cass's Miasma) or very slow to reload (Rengar's Q+ Empowered Q/Shaco's Jack in the Box(s)).

Yes, that can only happen once every 18 seconds initally, but hitting a minion to keep yourself in combat combined with gaining levels and opening up W (an excellent harass, farm, and rage gain tool) means you'll be at max rage in no time. That's 20% cooldown, essentially for free, in the laning phase.

I think that's kinda big, especially given that you can then grab armor items, the go to stat to counter most top laners, and even gain a bit of damage out of it. Combine that with further grabbing Ionian & having 4% CDR on masteries, and you've got 39% CDR very early. Again, that's kinda huge early game for a character based (mostly) on cooldowns.

Finally, as for Skjold's playstyle, I'm not debating that a fast and frenetic playstyle would be enjoyable, especially on a tank. A friend of mine has been all over Thresh's recent release, and its a very active tanking style, lots of movement and counter plays, CC and disruption. Active play is far superior to inactive play.

Not to repeat myself, but that is really the crux of my issue with this resource system as is. If you mess up a play, you don't get to play for longer ontop of being at the disadvantage of having messed up the play. The added danger to failure doesn't really add to the fun in my opinion. This is because there's not really a true peak to contrast the valley, there's just normal or fail.