User blog comment:Telaruhn/Bal-Goth, The Killer Mastermind/@comment-1330314-20140427055258

You have a solid kit for an assassin! Your champion has a lot of flavor (the icons are beautiful, too) and stands out as a versatile assassin with a lot of utility. I do think, however, that there are features you can improve on your kit.

Doom Lotus is thematically fantastic, and communicates the feel that you're marking your targets for death. The effect, however, isn't actually interesting in itself, though: what it basically means is that every attack except your first will deal enhanced damage, which is another way of saying your first attack deals sub-par damage (dealing damage means you deal increased damage, which you extend by dealing more damage). You need a new effect on this: for example, if you still want this to be a source of damage, you could have Bal-Goth's basic attacks deal a portion of the target's missing health as bonus damage. Alternatively, you could give him some other bonus that would enable him to unleash his full combo on his target and finish them off.

Umbral Rush is thematically perfect and well-designed. I'd say the damage could be higher ( in additional damage isn't much for a spell, even if you can apply it twice), but this is up to you. Other than that, you have a typo in the tooltip ("Champion kills and assists add a charge of Shadowstep").

Spike Trap doesn't look like it fits too well in this champion's kit. Your champion's super-mobile and sneaky, and very offensively-minded, but this requires the enemy to stand still or remain in the area you're attacking for an extended amount of time, only to take damage that doesn't scale too well. I think you need to rework this ability so that you can use it on the fly. The true sight looks interesting, although 8 seconds of true sight is excessive. Try to keep the true sight at a fixed duration (4-5 seconds?) but instead have this ability either scale better in damage or work better as an ability capable of affecting multiple enemies.

Incapacitate is a great ability to ensure sticking power. The interaction with Lotus is a little bizarre, though: what it means is that if you use this to initiate (which would nearly never be the case, considering it's short-ranged and Bal-Goth has gapclosers) you get a piddly effect. I suggest you keep the 60% slow (without the mini-stun) and give this some other form of interaction, such as with basic attacks for example.

Mastermind's active is thematically interesting, but the passive has a few problems: for a champion almost entirely focused on burst and abilities, attack speed doesn't really benefit him. As a champion with a lot of free mobility already, the movement speed per enemy affected by a Lotus is a little overkill, particularly as it can go up to 60%. The functionality of this passive suggests that you want Bal-Goth to be deadlier and faster as he marks more and more targets, but the rest of his kit looks like it's single target-oriented. You should either change this ability so that it works against single targets, or change the rest of his kit so that it better incorporates autoattacks and multi-target damage. I personally think it would be much healthier for Bal-Goth if he were to focus on one target at a time (which is one of the core characteristics of assassins).

As for the active, there are a few ways you could improve the way it plays: first off, remove the global range and channel time. It doesn't make much sense for an assassin able to blink into the shadows to have to sit motionless and defenseless as he goes through his combo, and the only situations in which global range would matter would be abuse cases (i.e. mark a target for death, attack them a bit, recall to base then ult to go back to them). Second, you need to resolve the single versus multi-target discrepancy inherent in this ultimate: you summon a certain number of decoys depending on how many targets you marked, but you only end up running to one. You're effectively going out of your way to target multiple enemies just so that you can focus on one, which you could just as easily do by marking them only and teleporting to their decoy.

If you want multi-targeting potential and an ult that still has similar functionality, I recommend you take a look at Ember Spirit from Dota 2: his ultimate is two-part, the first part allowing him to send out decoys running to a target location (he stores up to 3 decoys at a time), and the second allowing him to target a decoy to dash to them and make it explode at any time. You could add some interaction with Doom Lotus here, but the main point is that you can effectively target either a single enemy or multiple victims.

Overall, your champion is beautifully designed. There's some improvement that can be done to tighten his abilities (namely his passive and Spike Trap) and some of his identity (is he single-target or multi-target?), but aside from that you have a very strong core and a kit that is coherent, flavorful and overall extremely healthy. Congrats!