User blog comment:Willbachbakal/(Champion Rework) Graves, the Outlaw/@comment-1920550-20150215080204/@comment-1330314-20150215220726

Okay, to make this clear, design is what you want your champion to achieve overall, what you want them to be strong at, what you want them to be weak at, and how your champion interacts with their own team and the enemy team. It's the core structure of your kit, not the details. Balancing comes down to how strong the strengths are, how weak the weaknesses are, and how powerful the champion is overall (so the fine-tuning). If I were to halve my E AoE's damage, or make it temporary, that would change the balance, but not the design. I don't think either is necessary, because this is Graves's only source of power in-between bursts of damage and doesn't affect his single-target damage, unlike Fishbones, which is also an unlimited effect with greater range and even more damage. You claim that the concept itself is OP, yet Jinx proves that the idea is perfectly workable. The mana cost to her attack does not prevent the effect from being on-demand and practically unlimited, and the tradeoff she makes (lessened attack speed) show that it's possible to balance AoE damage on every autoattack. Again, you mention champions like, and , who all have critical design flaws (Elise is too much of a generalist, Zac's kit has a lot of anti-patterns and Urgot's kit is completely mismatched), as somehow well-designed yet screwed over by poor balancing, but that balance work was necessary because of those design flaws, so I don't think your idea of how design or balance work is entirely correct.