User blog comment:GreenMoriyama/Sauna, the Yordle-Brawler/@comment-25228021-20160821122419

Here I am at this again. I'm not going to expand on her lore, because I've seen a lot of characters with this type of lore in the years I spent reading fanfictions and all. It's not awful, far from that, but I just don't like it a lot because it seems that things just happened without much of a reason.

So, Sauna's a Fury champion. What's weird about it is she doesn't use Fury like any other Fury-based champion (and I don't count Shyvana because her Fury's a glorified cooldown for her ultimate). Having her abilities consume a percentage of her current fury sounds good in theory because you get minimal and maximum values easily, but in practice, it's unwieldy for the player, as the resource management is barely a factor and you will only end up flinging your abilities around. None of them even consume it all so at one point it will feel like since she still has Fury left, you didn't do as much as you could have done. Flat Fury costs are a lot clearer and I think she'd benefit a lot from less variability in her ability's effects. You might also want to streamline her Fury gains to match other Fury champions, with maybe one little thing to give her a little more. I will also pass on the ability names because they're a bit bland and any other fist-based fighter could use them.

I think her Q might be a little overpowered. A dash with untargetability, even so short, makes it a bit too easy to get in while also avoiding a lot of punishment. Imagine if Warwick's ultimate made him untargetable? You have the weaker version of this as a basic ability. I find it strange that an auto-attack modifier only scales on bonus AD and not total AD, on top. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Her W's passive is kind of strange. If you're going to give her attack speed in a passive like this, try not to dilute the effects like this. Either go the Volibear route, as in "only give the attack speed with the stacks", or the "give her attack speed passively, and more when she fully stacks up" route. Both combined makes the stacks barely noticeable.\\ In comparison, I don't have much to say about the active. It's kinda like Poppy's new E before it even existed, and without that annoying dash-blocker. I will only question one thing, and it's the fact that the base shield doesn't scale with the ability's rank, only the Fury bonus does.

Her E is her second dash. That'll pass, as her Q isn't really good for the 125/200 units it'll move her. The amount of knocks though. Oh well, it's still got counterplay as Sauna's stuck in a channel, so the knockup is actually fairly easy to avoid or interrupt, even more so when Sauna's got more Fury, don't ask me why. Also, capping at 2 seconds is useless, because at 100 Fury, E eats 50, so the channel time and knockup are 1.5 second. I also think the uppercut should scale on total AD rather than just bonus AD. The Fury scaling is kinda weak too, on top: channelling 1.5 second only for 110% bonus AD scaling on one target? Darius's Q, for 0.75 second of "channelling", gives him 140% total AD on pretty much everything around him if he can line up properly.

And her ult is a bit strange. Increasing the Fury maximum is kinda rubbish in my opinion. If you want her abilities to scale more on Fury consumption, just increase the abilities' Fury scalings. It will also make it easier to cast the second part of her ultimate...\\ Which is basically an AoE true damage nuke. It's not very interesting, and binary as hell: Sauna will basically never be able to land a good one. Let me explain why: this is a point blank AoE, on a champion whose only dash crosses at best 600 units and might lock her in place for up to 1.5 second in a teamfight, and on top she has to complete a 1-second channel, also fully interruptible. When she does land it, it's an AoE Darius ultimate that she only ever gets to use once. I don't think I would bother using it, and that's her ultimate.

So don't mistake me, I sorta like the idea, even though it doesn't have a lot that we haven't seen before. I just think it requires some cleaning around to make it something that can stand on its own. You should focus on the most interesting things in her kit and the core of it: I mean her E's uppercut followup and her Fury system respectively. A certain amount of the rest suffers from a bit of an overload that prevents the abilities' purpose from being absolutely clear, so I can't help a whole lot just yet.