User blog comment:Degritone/Iont, the Quick Ninja/@comment-6719710-20141230140512/@comment-1330314-20141230212124

Champions who lock down their targets in League tend to be tanks, which is pretty much the opposite of what you'd expect from a stealthy, squishy ninja (which is why is thematically mismatched). A "quick ninja" implies a champion capable of getting in and out of fights quickly enough to evade sight, sort of like but even subtler. By contrast, your champion's this dude who builds health, jumps on his target, enrages them and holds them down with chains, something more akin to, say, Ares from Smite than your average smoke-bomb throwing, shadow-stalking deft assassin. Your guy's quick in the same sense as or, in that they can blow all of their abilities at once to lock down priority targets. That does not mean quickness is their defining trait, or even a quality that would cross your mind when thinking of them.

Abilities to "keep you alive" make sense on a bruiser or a tank, both of whom want to stay in a fight for an extended period of time, as does your armor/MR steroid, whose (not very clear) conditional extends its duration the longer you remain in combat, but then you don't want him to have a lasting impact in fights (this also contradicts the focus on CDR, which would allow Iont to use his abilities more often). You need to decide if you want your champion to be purely focused on initiation, in which case you need to remove these abilities which only become useful over time, or whether you want your champion to be effective over longer durations, in which case you may want to add energy generation. Assassins are the champions who want to spend the least time in fights, yet every energy champion, including League's ninja assassins, have energy generation, so even if you want a bursty champion you should consider implementing it.

The problem with calling your champion high-risk is that he isn't, really: your dude's got two forms of hard crowd control and builds tanky. Tanky champions tend to be the lowest-risk around, precisely because their tankiness allows them to survive heavier damage than most. You say your champion needs his Q sustain to not die faster than his target, but that's already what his W steroid is meant to do. You also want your champion to kill targets faster than he can die, but Iont isn't built for damage: he has terrible burst and scalings (about half of that of your average assassin), but that's acceptable considering all of the tankiness and crowd control he gets. Your champion's a bruiser, perhaps even a tank, and so you shouldn't be aiming to "take out" targets in the way a ninja typically would (i.e. killing).

I also strongly object to the 80% CDR you're imposing on him, mainly because of the above mentioned reasons (Iont's passive has no gameplay, constrains his build, and is abusive), but also because what you're aiming for can easily be solved just by having his spell cooldowns decrease over time: Iont doesn't need 80% CDR to have a 36-second cooldown on a 180-second ult, he just needs 40% CDR and a 60-second base cooldown (at rank 3, perhaps). It may look the same to you, but what I'm proposing allows Iont to not depend so hard on CDR (it doesn't look critical to the use of his abilities, either, as opposed to champions like Azir and ), whereas your passive creates such a high level of variance that he needs to build cooldown reduction in order to function.

I also think there are much better ways to implement what you're aiming for: if you want your champion to survive dashing to the back line, implement a longer dash, or better stealth, or even a double-dash (which, incidentally, you happen to have on your E). If you really want Iont to land three Qs on the same target to the point that you want to give him a broken taunt (again, seconds of loss of control every second is not good), perhaps you may want to scrap both the taunt and your triple-Q mechanic (why did you implement it in the first place?). From what you're explaining, a lot of the mechanics in your kit are designed to paper over the flaws left by other parts of your abilities. Perhaps you should take your champion back down to the base of what you're aiming for, and look for a healthy core to build upon, not a playstyle to fix internally.