Talk:Sion/@comment-6016076-20140101205505/@comment-6016076-20140111132240

@CliffShadow

Hey good point about the size increase affecting his Q collision width. I did that mostly for fun factor, but that consequence didn't occur to me! I think those are details that are beyond me to hammer out :)  Preferably, it would have no effect.

Sion's Anti-Kite

I would also agree that he has possibly the best anti-kite kit in the game. One thing I'd like to point out is that his W's MS bonus scales over time and starts off small, so there is a window of time to destroy it. In fact, it's not until 5 seconds into W that it matches the bonus distance covered by Garen's Q. Also, CC can buy you even more time and in addition prevent you from stacking E, since he needs 3 stacks and they all disappear after 2.5 seconds if he doesn't strike a target. Admittedly, I can't think of every scenario on my own how this kit would play out exactly. There could very well be instances where it's mega OP. I guess that's why they do testing.

Building MR vs. Armor against Sion

Building MR against AD Sion is probably not the best idea. He has no scaling abilities that deal magic damage. He has high base damages, but it's nowhere near Shyvana, who deals 815 + 1.4 Bonus AD over 3 seconds (plus 425 if Ult hits you), or Jax, who deals 400 + 1.2 AP every 3 seconds with an auto attack reset. Building MR against AP Sion would be great. Although, his autoattacks will still hurt with his E, armor is 95% of the time prioritized over MR, and is much easier to stack. There are very few games where players don't end up with at least 120-130 armor, either through a simple Chain Vest and/or Ninja Tabi. An AP Sion will not have Last Whisper to answer that, so the passive on E does not guarantee his physical damage will be effective. In fact, it scales poorly into the late game even for AD Sion because a LW/BC's % reduction/penetration decreases the value of flat reduction by an amount equal to the percentage reduced/penetrated. However, Sion will be a strong duelist I believe, so I think it's ok if he doesn't automatically destroy tanks. This is precisely why I made it flat and not percent.

E Armor Reduction

The armor reduction stacking buff reduces 12 armor at level 1 at max stacks, so it removes 12% of the enemy's base HP in a duel. Example: Levels 1-3 the enemy will have around 25-35 armor with runes. Enemy's HP will be around 500-700. If we average it to 30 armor and 600 HP, your effective HP is 780. E's passive at max stacks reduces that amount by 72, which is around the damage provided by a level 1 nuke. To compensate for needing stacks, it also deals a bonus 10% AD on its active. It's still good early game, and makes the usual counter of "just build a chain vest" weaker. If Sion combines a Brutaliser with maxing E, he will be very powerful in extended trades early game. But I don't think level 1 harass will favor Sion.

Passive

Assuming 100 CS/10 minutes, his passive will grant a bonus 100 HP after 10 minutes. At 10 minutes in a solo lane, you are usually around level 7 or 8, which is about 1200 HP. This means his passive results in an 8% bonus in health, which isn't bad. After 20 minutes, if you're at 200 CS, you will have +300 HP. You will probably be about level 14, so that's around 1800 HP. This means you have +15% bonus HP. It does scale better as the game goes on. I was actually thinking about changing the passive to a flat 2 HP for all levels, to be honest. I think I just might do that. Of course, this is very dependent on your ability to CS.

Conclusion

None of this is meant to negate your points, since you raise a lot of valid questions that ultimately would require in-game testing to answer. I can only speculate so much from my desk chair here, and these responses have merely been to share my perspective. Thanks for your critique, compliments and discussion, though. I know it was a lot of reading, time to think about it, and writing a response, so that was really cool of you to follow through :)