User blog comment:Nhan-Fiction/(Champion Remake) Fiora, the Grand Duelist/@comment-1330314-20131229172717

I really like a lot of the changes, but ultimately I don't think this entirely solves all of Fiora's issues. Also, the art's neat (and cute)!

Giving better late game scaling is a great idea, but changing the base regen, regen per level and duration over which it extends all at the same time is too fiddly. The base amount and duration should remain constant (particularly the duration, as otherwise it would be difficult for Fiora and her opponents to predict how long her regen will last without constantly checking the tooltip), but the amount per level could be scaled accordingly. Normalized, the total amount of health regenerated per level per stack is, which can roughly be equated to 7( at each level) over 6 seconds. This has the advantage of smoothing out the regen spikes at levels 5, 9 and 13, and also prevents her regeneration per second from becoming too high: regenerating 82 health over 3 seconds gives Fiora 27.3 health per second at one stack, which is already too high, and 109.3 health per second (or 546.7 health per 5) at 4 stacks, which can surpass a tanked-up 's regeneration with his ultimate up. Maintaining the regeneration over 6 seconds would halve that amount, which would make her regen a lot more reasonable.

While I like the idea of associating armor penetration to, the implementation is really bizarre. Flat armor penetration is massively powerful in the early game, where Fiora already shines, and even 8 flat armor pen, coupled with armor penetration runes, would cause the ability to deal true (i.e. fully unmitigated) damage early on. This would also create a weird power curve where Lunge's damage would be initially huge, but then experience an equally large drop-off as the opponent's armor per level (or from items) allows them to surpass the ability's flat penetration and actually mitigate the damage. This also seems like a weird missed opportunity: Lunge is Fiora's opener, and Fiora is a fighter who's really good at applying on-hit effects thanks to her ultimate, but she has no inbuilt on-hit effects that benefit her team. Instead of giving Lunge its own armor penetration, you could have it either apply an effect onto the target or a buff to Fiora that would stack with each application of physical damage (the effect could then either be percentage armor penetration, which would make Fiora a much stronger assassin, or percentage armor reduction a la, which would allow her to bring utility to her team). Also, the mana cost reduction seems a little random (Fiora doesn't have mana problems), but is otherwise fine.

The idea of doubling 's passive attack damage bonus upon a successful parry is fantastic. As it stands the existing passive's fairly boring, and just feels way too strong when Fiora's constantly harassing early on and unresponsive for Fiora when she parries. Rewarding her for parrying successfully while limiting the power without gameplay she gets from this is exactly what she needs. Cleaning up her active so that it also negates on-hit effects is a QoL buff she needs, if only because right now the lack of it feels like an oversight.

That said, I'm not too keen on the damage reflection change. The flat AP scaling, though part of her current active, looks out of place, and neither interacts with not builds off of the reflection percentage. Changing the flat reflection to a percentage of the opponent's autoattack damage also looks iffy: in the early game, the tiny percentage would make the reflected damage hard to notice, particularly as it's reflected as magic damage and thus would be mitigated far more than physical damage early on. However, in the late game this ability would become even more situational than its current version, with massive differences in results: a support might set off the parry and incur little to no damage to themselves, but a marksman could crit, reflect all of the damage back at themselves, which would bypass their now-paltry magic resist, and incur a massive damage spike akin to a mage's nuke. I think you should keep the flat amount, especially as its base amount already makes it strong against squishies. Also, as with Lunge, I don't quite understand reducing the ability's mana cost.

Giving Fiora movement speed upon activating makes perfect sense, and would fix the ability's ineffectiveness at providing her with actual mobility. The resulting boost would probably also mean the movespeed bonus would then need a nerf, but moving it to an immediate activation is perfect. Changing the mana cost makes sense, though you could probably gate it a little harder, particularly as this gives her even better mobility in lane.

Not too many changes on, though I still don't quite agree with them. Reducing the cooldown by 10 seconds looks fine but unnecessary, and rendering Fiora spell immune during her ult removes any counterplay associated with it: granted, it's not fun to ult and get killed in the middle of it, but it's even less fun to get ulted on for potentially massive amounts of damage and not be able to fight back. If you want Fiora to have more safety while using it, you could either specify that she'd spend less time "emerging" from each strike, which would make it more difficult to interrupt her, or that she'd be immune to crowd control while ulting, which would allow her opponents to finish her off if she's at low health but otherwise not pull her out of her ultimate.

You've done a lot to clean up Fiora's quality-of-life issues (namely the functionality of her E, the passive on her W and the scaling on her innate), but I think you need to take another look at how to make Fiora less binary: her problem in the meta is that she has potentially massive amounts of damage, but zero burst or utility. She has an ultimate that makes her very proficient at applying on-hit effects, but her kit lacks any meaningful interaction with it, which also makes her very dependent on expensive items and thus gives her a terrible mid game (unless she snowballs), and an even worse late game if she doesn't get fed. You had a great idea in associating armor penetration with her Lunge; turning it into an on-hit effect that would give her assassin capabilities (i.e. armor penetration) or utility (armor reduction) would go a long way in smoothing out her power issues.