User blog comment:Toppoo1234/Stance Champion/@comment-1330314-20140204060430

While Hans's abilities are mostly individually interesting, his kit has several large design flaws. In general, you've given a ranged champion the kit of a melee fighter, and have given him access to nearly every effect in the game (sustain, tankiness, damage, soft and hard crowd control, mobility and healing). Even though your abilities are not arranged in the same way, its effects make it very similar to Udyr's kit.

Seal Explosion providing an additional effect is a good idea, but at the same time it would make for awkward gameplay issues: it's a passive that increments on ability use, but is also expended upon casting an ability. This means you'd have to rely on a very rigid rotation to use this effectively, and that can cause problems in fights. It would also force you to break your rotation in the middle if you're planning to empower a spell you just used. Champions with combo mechanics like this (, and ) have ways to prevent this: Annie has only one effect and three offensive abilities, and so doesn't have to withold spellcasting to make full use of her passive,  triggers on autoattack and thus can be controlled better, and Brand's abilities combo off of each other. If you could find a way to make Seal Explosion more controllable (i.e. allow Hans to better manage the use of his own passive and use it when he wants to), it would improve the ability significantly.

Seal of Fire is good for the most part. However, the damage overall is way too strong: the total damage at rank 5 dealt by the empowered version of this ability (an empowered ability you can cast every 6 seconds with 0 CDR and every 3.6 seconds with 40% CDR) inflicts a massive 550 damage. The base damage is already more than that of most rank 3 ultimates, and the AP scaling beats even that of 's ultimate at maximum efficiency. Granted, Hans has no real ultimate and only 2 damaging abilities (and the bonus damage here is a DoT), but this spell is on an extremely short cooldown. You need to severely tone down both the base damage and AP scalings on the base and empowered component. A more minor problem is with the length of the empowered component's burn effect: it lasts 5 seconds, but the base cooldown on your ability is 6 seconds. With 17% CDR or more, burn effects from multiple empowered Qs will overlap (and it's possible to have them overlap by spamming every ability). The duration needs to be shorter.

On a melee champion, Seal of Wind would be a good ability, if not one that offers really generous amounts of mobility (a dash, plus flat and percent increased movespeed, along with an AP-to-movement speed scaling). On a ranged champion, though, this just gives Hans way too much safety. This is where you're going to have to make a choice: either you have Hans keep his range, but severely tone down the power of this ability so that it only offers a tiny amount of mobility (particularly because of its extremely short cooldown), either you bring Hans down to melee range, and only have to nerf this a little (removing either the dash or percent movespeed component would work). The empowered component looks good for escaping early game, but a 15% slow gets weak pretty early on. Having it scale with rank would put it on a power level equal to that of the other empowered effects.

Seal of Water is another ability that would be good on a melee champion, but not good on a ranged one. Melee champions are constantly exposed, and could do with a heal (and even then, the power of heals on melee champions is limited to prevent too much free sustain). Ranged champions, on the other hand, are far less at risk. Any instance of damage you deal to them should be significant, and a cheap heal on a low cooldown just invalidates any attempt one might make to deal any damage to Hans. Again, either you make Hans a melee champion to justify the healing on this ability (though you should still find a way to limit it), either you're going to have to redo this ability with little to no sustain, since it would otherwise be far too strong and destructive to good play. In either case, though, you should probably redo the empowered component: AoE healing is a support ability, but your champion is clearly not designed to be a support. A stat beneficial to Hans himself would make more sense. As with Seal of Fire, the duration of the heal, both normal and empowered, works weirdly with cooldown reduction and would have to be reduced (the healing amount per second right now would also be unnoticeable, even though it's a huge amount over time).

Seal of Earth is, again, good on melee champions but not so good on ranged champions (even has a significantly low range to justify his shield). The other problem with this ability is the overstacking of defensive bonuses: on one hand, your champion gains damage reduction, which is functionally identical to armor and magic resist, and the empowered component gives a shield and even more armor and MR on top of that. It would be a lot clearer to remove the armor and MR from the empowered component and just keep the shield. The base damage reduction lasts a tad too long (you can cast this every 3.6 seconds at 40% CDR), and the way you've implemented the shield is a little weird: 6 seconds means you can technically have the shield up all the time, and with all the free tankiness you already get it's far too good, but having it cancel upon changing seals means you either waste your shield or force yourself to not cast anything until the shield breaks, which would be counter-productive. Drastically reducing the shield's duration would be a better idea.

I'm also curious as to the utility scalings you gave Hans: currently, utility scalings are limited to support champions, who are meant to get better utility, to distinguish them from mages, who use scalings to increase their damage. You've given both to the same champion. Why give Hans an AP scaling to damage reduction, bonus movement speed and regen?

In general, I think you need to take another look at this kit. The main problem lies with Hans's range: either he needs to become a melee champion for his abilities to make sense, either you need to redo most of his kit to prevent his play pattern from becoming too frustrating (he has way too much safety, sustain and tankiness for a ranged champion). In general, though, you're going to have to make a big effort to distance yourself from : it's fine that both are stance champions, but both champions have a shield, a movespeed boost, a stun on autoattack every 6 seconds, sustain, autoattack-based AP damage and an AP DoT nuke. Hans essentially has access to all of Udyr's bonuses save for his passive and, in more powerful form and with additional effects.