User blog comment:Wlord99/Ellaria, the Sand Phantom/@comment-7709681-20200125081559/@comment-28171995-20200127203650

Thanks for your honest review. When I thought of Ellaria, I wanted her to be a very ellusive and deceptive assassin, rivaling Leblanc, Evelynn and Akali, which naturally means that she can be annoying to deal with. Generally, Ellaria would have a lot of choices to do (eg. does she use W,E or R to close in on an enemy, will she have sufficient damage/CC left, will she be able to proc the innate). If she cant execute her combo right, her high cooldowns limit her afterwards.

I - This ability is supposed to carry a meaningful amount of Ellaria's damage, to shape her gameplay and to give enemies a way to play around her. Yes, only the damage component goes on a cooldown, for her to have an incentive to continuously strike enemies in their face. About the facing mechanic, think of it as a Fiora vital, that keeps moving with a units face.

Q - I admit that the current stock system could be abused to effectively reduce the cooldown too much. Otherwise, Ellaria only gains the the movement speed when she actually hits an enemy champion, for her to manouver around them (to possibly proc the innate).

W - Well, this is the most versatile ability in the kit and as you mentioned it's indeed supposed to trap enemies for Ellaria to follow up with abilities to proc the innate. Under realistic circumstances, to trap an enemy, she either sacrifices another ability(and damage) to be close enough or she ambushes them, making use of the invisibility of the effect. Instead she can also use this to evade enemy attacks without burning her damage at the cost of reliability. Taking into consideration the restrictions(cooldown, cost, low range), I think the current behaviour is justified, although further restrictions, such as the removal of either the mobility or the untargetability, are thinkable.

E - Thanks, I got confused with the definitions. The charge is meant to slow down Ellarias combo, granting enemies another way to play around her. But instead of just being a boring charge, I wanted Ellaria to still be able to "dance" around enemies, while they try to anticipate from where she'll strike. On the other hand if an enemy doesn't see her begin the channel (ambush or innate) she has the opportunity to surprise them. Also I don't think Liandry's is proced on every instance of magic damage.

R - For an ultimate, this ability isn't that much of a gamechanger, so I took inspiration from a similar case, Leblanc's ult, and "copied" that. Also, there a (visible) short delay before Ellaria cast the spell, similar to Cassiopeia, for enemies to react.

Finally, I'd again like to thank you for your feedback, I've done some changes according to it.