User blog comment:Degritone/Iont, the Quick Ninja/@comment-6719710-20141230140512/@comment-25364408-20141230185033

Ninjas are supposed to deal with a high priority target quickly. Zed has his assassination, Kennen both assasinates and has lockdown. Despite being ninjas, Akali and Shen don't do the task of a ninja; Akali just kills everyone while Shen has DPS and tankiness. Iont is meant to fulfill the roll of a ninja, quickly dealing with a priority target in his own way, lockdown. He's a "Quick Ninja" because he can do his job quickly.

The ideal combo would be W into 700 range of the enemy ADC or whoever does the most damage, E them, Q them, E toward your teammates, and finish it with an ult to their face. He's not meant for extreme sustained damage, nor is he meant to stay in a fight much longer than he needs to, like a ninja. His sustain is to keep him alive should they focus him once he ults their ADC. 500 range isn't much when you're trying to lock down the ADC, the back line. That should put you about in the center of the enemy front line.

The taunt is to make sure he can land his Q on an important target. Missing or missusing it would be a terrible thing, considering its long cooldown and what it's meant for. You don't want to hit the tank when that completely messes up your ability to take out the target. Qing someone other than the target you ulted should be a signal to the enemies that says "Hey, a free kill." Ninjas' work is risky as heck. Playing Iont shouldn't be an acception.

Without his sustain given by his teammates, he'd die quicker than the locked down target. I could remove the taunt, but quite literally being in the middle of the enemy team during a teamfight has insane risks involved already. I highly doubt an enemy would just stand in one place for the 0.3 seconds it takes for Q to work upon getting jumped on, let alone the time it would take to jump away and ult. 0.3 seconds is both nothing and a lot. People complain about 0.25 second cast times, let alone the 0.3 seconds, plus the time it takes to jump in and out and the time it'd take for the chains to actually reach their target that he's fully vulnerable.

I could add energy sustain to his Q or E, but again, he's not meant to have large impact in longer battles for the full duration of the fight, but have large impact in longer battles during the first 2-3 seconds, completely negating an enemy from the rest of the fight. His CDR is so he can be effecient in this, with his ult being up every 36 seconds with 80% CDR, leaving him able to fully regenerate his energy for a second go if the enemy takes long enough to retry.

In my opinion, energy esn't meant for DPS champs or champs with multiple enemy killability, but people designed specifically for single target death, and should be finished after using their abilities. That fits true ninjas quite well.