User blog comment:Whatehf/Malia, Child of Earth/@comment-1330314-20140205065941/@comment-1330314-20140205110211

I don't think your Q as it is now would qualify as "strong poke" in any sense. Most skillshots have a range around 1000, yours has a 700 unit range, which makes it by far the shortest-ranged skillshot in the game (shorter even than ). It also has the quirk of being two-part, which makes it even harder to fully land. If you do happen to land both, you end up dealing  damage, less than most damaging abilities that are much easier to land (Again, compared to Ice Shard, which deals   damage in one go, on top of its slow, greater range and shorter cooldown). Contrast this to, say,, which has 925 range,  damage and an extremely potent (80%) slow, and you've got a pretty underwhelming ability. Malia's going to have to put herself at huge risk to land this ability, and right now there is no incentive for her to do so. Giving each boulder a root would make this a good initiation ability, and wouldn't make her poke excessively strong. It would also justify her sub-par basic attack range, as right now she can't even harass without getting extremely close to her enemies. I also think it would actually not be a bad thing if your Q sounded like a Pokemon ability (there are literally hundreds of them anyway, so you're bound to have an ability that sounds like one), since they're designed to reflect their theme. I'd love to see your lore, though.

Having Malia's passive act on allies within Sand Trap doesn't sound like it would work: this is an ability you're going to lay down on enemies (and you might as well extend the range for that reason, as right now it's tiny) to prevent them from chasing or escaping. Most of the time, your allies are never going to be on this, even with the potential AS bonus they might get. It also makes little sense to have this affect allies, again because it's an offensive ability that has no intrinsically beneficial component for allies. Having two ground-targeted DoT abilities also doesn't make for good visual feedback (you're laying one long-duration AoE within another, which makes it confusing for enemies to figure out what they're standing on), so you might as well move the slow onto her W and make a new E. The other reason I think you should move the slow onto her W is because right now, again, it's extremely ineffective as a support ability. Neither the healing nor the damage are significant enough to make a big change in a fight, and this is partly because you've diluted them over a long duration.

The idea I had wasn't so much to make a ult so much as a support-oriented  ultimate. You're not going to be initiating with this, since knockback will place the enemy outside of your team's range. Instead you're going to use it to peel in a manner similar to 's ultimate (which also has knockback and healing, so careful with the overlap there). The choices you list are themselves conducive to inefficient use of Wave of Hope: if you initiate, you push the enemy team out of range and potentially out of danger. If you use this to turn a fight, you'll get the same result and push your opponent(s) away. If you use it to peel for just one person, you're missing on its AoE component, and if you're peeling for your whole team you're going to be too far back to make full use of the knockback. In both cases, having it give attack speed to your teammates is fairly useless, since you're trying to get the enemy team away from your allies. It's a bit like 's ultimate in that it has a lot of effects you're never going to use properly. By contrast, Lulu, Janna and Nami's ultimates, for example, have clear situations where you're achieving total success with your ability. Turning this into a pure peel (which might as well be instant, not a wave as with Nami's ult) and giving it damage would make it far easier to read and more efficient.

The problem with a support that is purely focused on damage and healing is that this is inherently bad for gameplay: healing negates damage, but additional damage on your side just means you can ignore the enemy's attacks and freely attack them back. This is the main reason 's getting reworked, and the reason why supports typically have restrictions on their damage or healing. On the other hand, crowd control and healing (which is more along the lines of an earth theme), or buffs and healing, are healthier. Your champion looks like someone who can exert massive and continuous AoE control during a fight, and if you want to define her more you could work towards that direction.