User blog comment:Emptylord/Champion reworks/My Mid Year Mage Update/@comment-24951773-20160309225039/@comment-3974211-20160310014523

Oh, no, I appreciate the feedback - I'd just hoped the rework wasn't such a huge shift in familiarity. While designing it, turning purple spell effects into voidlings was the only big change I wanted to make to his familiarity - preserving his perpendicular wall, ground targeted spell, and targeted damage over time. In fact, it started with merging Summon Voidlings and Malefic Visions (I.e. Summons a voidlings to attack the target for a few seconds) - because I felt like having the damage over time targetable added an interaction for his opponent. I could have maybe stopped here but then I felt like I'd just removed some of his flavour by making his voidlings a short duration thing, so I had his W summon a new voidling. Then it just made sense to swap out Q's purple bolts with a giant worm, 'cause I now had Malzahar the Harbinger of the Void - which isn't something I thought was unfamiliar to Malzahar.

Tonight's change to his Q was because I felt like I'd made it too difficult for Malzahar to actually duel someone to the extent I felt I'd removedany reason for Malzahar to engage with his enemy. He'd become a Yorick who just summons creeps as a proxy (which is why I always had his Ironback function as a minion). I also tweaked his innate on your feedback, although probably not to anything you might find more appropriate for Malzahar.

With this kit, his ultimate could even remain unchanged. He doesn't have the innate burst in the rest of his kit to insta someone with just his ultimate - but at the same time, I think that removes the incentive to cast his ultimate. I'm seriously considering making it a cone so it would have a huge utility purpose of shutting down the enemy's engage.