User blog comment:KeithCornell/Champion Concept - Amaia, the First Woe/@comment-3391671-20170129110556/@comment-25228021-20170905190458

Well, I guess it's time to explain myself.


 * Amaia's kit was basically doomed to get really long if I wanted her to do more than just damage. I think I have already justified my reasoning with the AS into AD to Lesdin below, but I'll say it again: most of her weapons are precision weapons or heavy weapons. I didn't want to have her basically launch two grenades per second, as it gets awkward fast.
 * The reloading is the same part as the disarm, it's basically the cooldown of her stances. It's impossible to attack properly with Amaia, as mentioned in her passive, so she has to use ammo to attack. It's a full part of her kit.
 * Hurting someone does reveal you... for 0.25 second.
 * Q is different than the other abilities in that she can fire while moving, while in the other stances, she is still stuck during the auto-attack's windup. if you were to move during that time, the auto-attack would get cancelled.
 * The passives mention no stance, so they are active whichever stance she goes into. To the "oh, there's too many passives going on", I will answer that they trigger on an ability activation, so they're pretty much actives. It's just that different things happen depending on which stance she leaves or enters.
 * One of the point of Amaia is that everything she has is a skillshot. She literally has zero guaranteed damage if you can't hit stuff. I do agree that it's easy to get overwhelmed by the number of effects, but if Amaia is going to do more than just damage, I needed to add things this way, and not overbloat only one of her abilities. Need I mention that I tailored the passives specifically to give you specifically what you need whan you switch? You probably guessed. The 2-second duration on all of them is also the global cooldown on which her abilities are put when she enters a stance, to track it easier.
 * Amaia's most identifiable weapon is supposed to be her semi-auto: her Q, if you will. It's the one that she's going to use the most, because due to the high number of ammo and a 3-second reload time (due the grenade launcher's 6 seconds and the sniper's 9 seconds), it's by far her most reliable weapon.
 * Amaia's guns pretty much "are" hunks of metal. All guns are. But the point is: all of them do different things.


 * Amaia's crimefighting isn't the same as Caitlyn's. She's basically an underground vigilante, and the only thing that didn't make her a criminal was that she attacked criminals herself, and of course, she ended up being treated as a criminal, which she pretty much was. As for her father, he does have the fact that he didn't know what she was doing for his defense.
 * It's probably now that I mention that I probably rushed the story. I'm not good at this storytelling thing because I'm always too hasty.


 * Amaia did grow into a bitter troublemaker in the transition to Zaun, because she's kinda mad at Piltover and all that. In short, she was "broken" because she killed someone, and she came back and her mother was dead, so instead of her usual attitude before that, the "spunky" you talked about, she got even more resentful.
 * My storytelling is bad because I take a lot of things for granted. It is a weakness of mine, but at least I can explain when I'm asked, and eventually I'll fix the story part.


 * So, Amaia's basically suicidal at this point, because she's lost absolutely everything she ever had except for her guns. So she supposed, if I'm gonna die, might as well make this a "do-or-die" and have one last chance at living, because she believes that completing the climb will give her a reason to live. It was (of course) strongly inspired by Taric's own climb, simply because the trial of Mt. Targon is quite a strong test of character. The difference is, Taric found the Protector (whatever that is) at the top of the mountain, and I wanted to have someone manage the climb and still find nothing real.
 * I will answer to your last question: yes. In the end, when she's done climbing, she's basically given herself something to do, and proven her strength, if only to herself. She has gotten a certain amount of arrogance, as she doesn't think like she's a human anymore, like she persuaded herself she had become a new Targon deity.

The first real point of her character was to get a gun-user that wasn't like the others: at first she was kinda crazy and happy-go-lucky, that was basically Jinx (and her young self). Then I started pulling her like someone who wanted to make her kills count, but it leaned closer to a show, and that was basically Jhin. So to contrast with the unchecked destruction of Jinx and the twisted artistry of Jhin, I eventually transitioned her to a different style of character: a grim but determined type. And that's how it started.