User blog comment:ZPPHR/Lyle/@comment-1330314-20140914083204

The changes you just made are a significant improvement, but I think Lyle's main problem is still his passive: random power doesn't provide any gameplay of its own, and more often than not makes the mechanic in question difficult to balance and extremely unstable (i.e. you often get rewarded far too much or not nearly enough, without much of a middle ground). If you look at, who's heavily dependent on crit (though not actually as much as Lyle), his laning phase basically comes up to a coin toss at level 1-2, depending on whether he gets to proc a crit or not. The other issue here is that you're making Lyle's spells crit: if his spells were on extremely low (i.e. Ryze-level) cooldowns, then perhaps it would be sort of okay to have them crit, as you'd be able to produce crits to a certain degree of reliability during your rotation, but your W and E cooldowns are actually fairly long, as is your Q cooldown at early ranks. What this means is that one spell rotation, which you'd be able to perform every ~16 seconds at the start, could have a vastly different outcome depending on whether you got a lucky crit. From the looks of it, Discharge is meant to give Volatile Energy a degree of reliability, but you're still going to end up with a super-rocky laning phase pre-6.

A more minor issue here is Lyle's mana costs: Lyle definitely looks built to stack mana, but 150 mana for a 5-second cooldown spell is far too much. The same goes for every other ability. If you want Lyle to still eventually run out of mana no matter how much of it he builds, you should consider having one or more of his spells cost a percentage of his current/maximum mana in additional to a (small) flat mana cost. You sort of have that with Lyle's ultimate, but currently at 100% mana it'll still him ~72% of his maximum mana over the minimum 10-second duration (and ~88% max mana over the full 20-second duration), which is going way overboard.

While there's unavoidably going to be similarities to Ryze when making a mana-based champion (which is fine), Ionic Synapse skirts a little too close. You also have conflicting ranges, with the super-long Resonating Blast range making Lyle a potentially great poke champion but Discharge encouraging him to get near his enemies to deal damage (700 range is also a bit too wide for a PBAoE, as you'd be able to damage two Caitlyns attacking you at maximum range from opposing directions). This also makes Ionic Synapse's heal look a little weird: if Lyle looked like he needed the sustain to survive in and around combat, then he'd be fine, but with his sniper-range poke and long-ish cooldown basic ability rotation it feels misplaced. Having the ability restore mana instead would be a better idea, assuming you implemented it right: so, for example, Resonating Blast could cost a portion of Lyle's maximum mana and would have a lot of his power attached to it (but would then drain his mana very quickly if he spammed it), and then Ionic Synapse would restore that mana, provided Lyle put himself at risk.

There's a lot of potential still for mana-based champions, and some of Lyle's abilities, namely Discharge's drain/Dot, look really interesting, but right now your kit has a lot of issues holding it down. In addition to the above, your abilities stand out well individually, but don't have any clear combo or interaction with each other. There's also a fair bit of contradiction in several respects: your champion is dependent on spell crit, but has long cooldowns; he's meant to build mana, which means he'll build tanky, but has no incentive to stay in the middle of combat while his ult's down; he has no crowd control at all, which means he'd have either really good DPS or some other kind of utility, but he just has average burst. You want to make a champion who gets to play with mana more than any other champion, and while your kit has a lot of interesting elements, it needs tighter definition: you need to establish what you want your character to be very good at, besides using mana, and what gameplay niche you're trying to fill (as in, what Lyle brings to a team, and not just what makes his own gameplay unique).