User blog comment:YourPrivateNightmare/Unnecessary custom Graves changes 2.0/@comment-1330314-20141118232324/@comment-1330314-20141119124633

You're right: at the moment, there's no real reason to pick Graves over Lucian, who's more mobile and less mana-hungry, or, who's safer but has similar burst. That's why I think he needs to have his close-range burstiness and tankiness brought up to the best he can have: gameplay-wise, Graves should be a marksman who's not afraid to jump into a fight and put himself at serious risk in exchange for massive burst and resilience, and in terms of team comps he should be the ultimate dive comp carry, able to dive with his teammates and plow through the enemy front line.

I think taking away Buckshot's reliable cooldown reduction per rank and giving it CDR per kill would make it less consistent, not more consistent, since his primary nuke's uptime would be entirely dependent on Graves's ability to clear minion waves, which isn't always a given. I think seriously reducing Graves's autoattack range would actually be an indirect buff to Buckshot, since he'd tend to be much more often at a range where he'd get to catch his opponents with multiple bullets, and reducing its mana cost would help a lot too, but if you want more burst potential you could always have its damage increase more (have the ratio increase with rank, for example).

The problem with a linear collision skillshot is that, compared to a ground-targeted ability, it's always going to be less reliable, because a) you'll never be able to hit it at the exact location you want, since the projectile could only be stopped by an opponent and could therefore be blocked or dodged, and b) you're not going to be able to use it to hit the back line, which is where you want Smoke Screen to land (to blind the mage/enemy marksman), because your skillshot would easily get stopped by anyone on the front line. If you want more reliability, increase Smoke Screen's Radius, or decrease its projectile travel time. It's a good thing that you have to anticipate an enemy's path with this, because it allows you to set up choke points on the map that force your enemies to put themselves at heavy risk when travelling through.

I wouldn't call 70% attack speed a weak steroid, but if you're really concerned about its power, bump its strength up to, or. I think there are other ways you can make this ability interesting besides giving Graves a steroid (not every marksman needs a steroid anyway). I also don't think it's appropriate to bring in Lucian's mobility here: first off, his E scales with nothing else but cooldowns, so decreasing its cost is the only other way to make it stronger with rank. The other issue here is that Lucian's mobility paradigm is completely different: Lucian is meant to be a hyper-mobile carry, and he invests a huge amount of his power into that. Marksmen in general aren't supposed to have easy access to mobility, unless you're Lucian, or, so it's fine if Graves still has a mana cost to his own dash. I wouldn't object to reducing its mana cost, but I don't think it needs to become free in the late game.

I agree that Graves's win condition should rely on aggressiveness, but I think it should be more on a fight-by-fight basis. Fighting against Graves should be a bit like a cowboy duel: whoever draws first (i.e. initiates the fight) gets a significant advantage, so if Graves dives in first he gets to lay down his burst immediately and quickly get tanky, but if the enemy team initiates then he'd still be squishy while taking all of his opponents' damage. With that said, I don't think Graves really needs special tools to take down tanks: his burst already makes him a great squishy-killer, and I think that should be the focus of his abilities (dive up to the front line, burst down the squishies and then finish off the tanks and bruisers). Graves's passive already gives him an advantage over melee champions, because he can survive duels at close range, and with a stronger steroid he should be able to survive a bruiser or assassin's damage in the right conditions. I think it's fine that Graves doesn't get a dedicated tank-busting ability, and it's perfectly normal that he's autoattack-dependent (he's a marksman, after all). He doesn't need an armor shred on an ability that he typically uses as a finisher, and he doesn't really need to inflict more explosions through autoattacks when you could achieve practically the same effect by buffing his Q.