User blog comment:Degritone/Zero, the Machinegun Mage/@comment-1330314-20141102100831/@comment-25364408-20141102210923

'''I was writting down thoughts as I went through your review. No real organization beyond covering an entire paragraph oer paragraph, and some were skipped.'''

I wasn't here for Season 2, so I didn't know that full on-hit builds were sopowerful. So, still high-ish base AS with high scaling sound good? If I do that, he should still be the machine gun I want him to be, not what others would imagine: Ryze.

Read the lore and see if that's a good enough reason for you.

His passive would have no interaction on last hitting, as it only procs the damage and the speed against champions. His attacks would still travel at the speed of a Soraka banana against minions/structures. I want his autoattacks to be his main source of damage. As such, I made his attacks get buffed damage when doing as he should: focussing a target. Additionally, I the traveling speed of the AAs was done to make proccing even easier, as it would be hard to get a 7 / 6 / 5 AAs on the same target without at least one hitting the enemy champion, even if they were moving at the speed of Soraka's bananas. If I let people build AD, we risk having a hyper carry ADC in a champion who wasn't even meant for that role. I do agree that the damage is insanely high, but again, that's to make Zero AA-centric, rather than spell-based. I could tune it down to something like after proccing? Even if I change everything else, Zero was derrived from the passive, not the other way around. It's keeping the same general idea: damage and travel speed modification.

Again, he's meant to be AA-centric. I guess I could lower cooldowns a bit. With the passive doung just (base +) AP damage after proccing, rather than AD + AP, I guess I can add base damages to the abilities. The reason the insane power curve is the way it is is that, the no base damages, of course, but also because it does damage ''per bolt. If you look at the actual increase of power per rank, you'll see that it's only increase per bolt''. The actual reason it increases to insanely is because the amount of bolts sent out increases on each rank, as well; one per rank for Q and five per five degrees for W. Their roles are, in my mind, quite well defined. The W is an anti melee button, as, if they're on you, they're going to take between eight and twelve times as much damage. It has a range shorter than his AA range for a reason, it's not meant to be used as a source of insane damage, it's meant as a way to say, "Stay away," to melee champs. The Q would also be hard to aim, as trying to lead using a banana would be hard. And again, it's a damage per bolt situation. I guess to mitigate the insane curve that we see, I could increase the early game power and reduce the late game power by doing one of two things: either making the % damage per bolt stay the same (biggest damage nerf to late game) or have a stable amount of bolts shot. I guess I could also make the W not pierce through enemies as to make it stoppable by tanks other than Braum.

As stated above, the bolts from Zero Flare travel pretty slowly, so being able to avoid it would be relatively easy, although not the easiest thing in the world. Hopefully the way I reworked it sounds better.

I think the active's different enough, as Flare is a sustained damage geared toward hitting enemies that are out of range, while Barrage is burst and geared toward hitting enemies closer to him than his range. And if you mean they're similar in that they both cause beams to fire off, he is a machine gun, after all. What else would a machine gun do? Fire off one beam that does massive damage? No, that's a rail gun.

Why wouldn't you want do divert aggro? Taking damage = bad. I guess I could make this the explosion that is in his lore, rather than the explosion that was on his Barrage.

Zero Hour is supposed to be a kamakazi move, as you're always taking at least one squishy with you, no matter how hard they may try to stop you. Basically only Tryndyman, Kayle, and people with revives woule be able to stop you from killing at least one person. If you die in the process, meh. You killed at least one important person. The reason it was on such a high cooldown was because it was a guarenteed kill, unless you got blinded.

With this paragraph, you have given me an idea. While he's not a Danmaku boss, nor is he intended to be, I made his ult riskier with a greater reward.