User blog comment:ZPPHR/Lyle/@comment-1330314-20140914083204/@comment-1330314-20140915054536

A pleasure! Thoughts on your most recent changes:

I'll probably never be a fan of spell crit, but at least the starting 30% chance would make crits more prominent. This is a good change, though I'd suggest you increase the crit chance-per-mana ratio at certain levels. 50% looks like the sweet spot, and while it previously took 4000 mana to achieve it now tooks 5000. 3000 would be the more reasonable option here (Lyle would need 1630 bonus mana at level 18), so you could have the ratio go to 1% per 200 mana at level 7, and then 1% per 150 mana at level 13. While this might be difficult to do now, as you embedded crit into every ability, I would recommend you find another passive/system, as crit carries no gameplay and you're putting a lot of Lyle's power into that (all the bonus effects hinge on RNG rather than player skill). The bonus effects are great, but the crit passive is holding them back.

The Power Burst/Resonating Blast combo looks nice, though the way you've implemented it encourages Lyle to attack from a distance rather than up close. I'm not saying he should be in melee range to achieve this, but having an effect increase with distance is something you'd typically only want for a long-ranged champion (i.e. Xerath). The effect is great, and I think you should keep it, but I think you need to change it so that it encourages Lyle to put himself at risk.

While having Power Burst cost max mana is a good move, what's missing is a way to restore this mana: 10% maximum mana means that Lyle will be OOM within 10 casts (perhaps a little bit more) regardless of how much mana he builds. Without any kind of ability-based mana restoration (more than just Power Burst's small max mana increase), he'd have very little autonomy before being forced to go back to base.

The thing with Dark Wind is that it's functionally the same as Spell Flux, which means you basically have the only two champions whose gameplay revolves around mana also throwing around balls of energy that bounce around and return to them. While a shield would make more sense than a heal, it would suffer from the same problem as Viktor's current Power Transfer: even with that tiny delay on the returning device, Viktor still ends up taking the brunt of a trade before he gets shielded. On an ability that can bounce up to 10 times (which is where crit goes against the shield by giving it an unpredictable delay), this means Lyle will likely get shielded way after he took the majority of the damage in a fight. I think you may want to redo this ability.

What I meant with Discharge being a DoT is that you deal damage every second for 12-20 seconds. That in itself is fine, but I think you could actually reverse the spell's effects: instead of costing Lyle a crippling amount of mana and disabling him further by increasing the cost of his spells, you could have the spell restore Lyle's mana based on a percentage of the damage dealt. Additionally, you could significantly decrease the ult's cooldown and/or make it a toggle. It would enable Lyle to cast a flurry of spells as long as he continuously puts himself at risk, which I think is a good tradeoff in itself, without having to give Lyle bigger mana issues.

Again, this is a significant improvement, but again, I think there are changes you can make that would make Lyle's kit flow a lot better. Your main objective here should be to give Lyle a way to manage his mana a lot more fluidly, and in a way that benefits him (i.e. mana restoration) rather than hinders him (i.e. his ult's mana drain and spell cost increase).