User blog:Lukeatlook/CCC3 - Pogoda, The Four Seasons

Pogoda, The Four Seasons is a custom champion in League of Legends.

Design concept
Pogoda (more about background and appearence below the skillset) is meant to be a versatile support mage that can help her team shape the flow of the game by adjusting her skillset. Unlike other transformation champions her ultimate has a fairly long cooldown and is channeled. Breaking the channel early results in diminished effect of the ultimate, but the skillset changes no matter how long did the channel last.

Pogoda starts in the Spring Form, suitable for both solo and duo laning. After reaching level 6 she can cast her ultimate, which transforms her into the form of the next season. All spells share similar traits:


 * Passive is stacking a statistic over time, then decaying in the next season (AP from Summer carries over to Autumn, but slowly fades)
 * Q is a bread-and butter small AoE (about 75 units radius) ability (think Karthus / Cassiopeia) with bonus effect when it hits a single target
 * W is an ally-targeted buff with additional effect on enemy attack/spell
 * E is a targeted AoE debuff spell with diameter of 700
 * R is global, with 2 second channel and 2 seconds of local effect around Pogoda after a full channel

Appearance
Pogoda is the Slavic goddess of the weather, nowadays it's the Polish word for the aura. Her design is quite simple - unlike badass-angry (optionally: psycho) women we've seen in the League for the last few years, she's meant to look peaceful and innocent. Simple dress, no cleavage (maybe in the summer form). Barefoot, no wand. Wears wreath that corresponds to the season.

Spring looks like a 15-year-old red-headed girl with freckles in a green dress. She wears flower wreath on her head. Her voice is full of vigor, much like Lux's. Summer wears a fiery red dress and wheatears in her blonde hair. She looks about 25-30. Her voice is deeper, much less naive and much more flirty. Autumn has some wrinkles, she's around 40-50. Yellow dress, black hair, red leaves in her hair. She's the most grumpy and annoyed one. Winter is an old, gray-haired lady in a blue dress and a holly wreath.

If the aging thing is too difficult to make or to confusing to play with, it can be simply a color pattern change, although it should be possible to do it with just textures. Voiceover would be probably the biggest part.

[Some inspiration 1]

[Some inspiration 2]

Of course the release skin should be Symphonic Pogoda (reference: vivaldi "The Four Seasons"), with a black dress and violin in her hand. Alternatively Zodiac Pogoda or Elemental Pogoda.

Strategy and Teamwork
Spring form suits Pogoda for the support role, with reliable root, AoE slow and a shield. Later in the game it's the form that allows to protect the carry in extended fights by peeling with root and slow. Summer form is the pushing stance and although using Summer Fever is quite mana-intensive it's generally the burstiest kit with built-in finishing mechanism on Overheat. It has no crowd control, though. Autumn transformation is another supportive one with rather low spell damage, but high utility. Winter is the second most defensive form with powerful anti-burst spellshield that can make enemy spellcasts backfire. If Equinox isn't on cooldown, it has also a built-in revive, making you the last one to get focused (hence why pretty much nonexistent AP scalings in that form).

Generally Pogoda utilizes AP and support items in all of her forms, but it's possible to build her as a mana tank for more sustained AoE damage on Summer Fever or even on-hit with Nashor's Tooth for more sustained single-target damage. The optimal route should be prioritizing CDR, since some of her abilities are designed to have 100% uptime with 40% CDR, gated only by high mana costs.

Balance
Obviously there are some things that I might have overlooked that are broken in nature. Everything can be tempered, but there are few core traits of her gameplay that I want to preserve:


 * Four forms - that one should be kinda obvious. The cycle of the seasons is intuitive and since the ultimates are global, nobody should be even surprised by what is the current season
 * Identical ability scope across forms - every Q and E is an AoE skillshot, every R is global with a locla effect after channel, every W is a buff
 * Frozen Mirror - it's probably her best spell and should define her Winter form
 * Global effect on transformations - it's supposed to be highly strategical champion with a wide range of possibilities