User blog comment:Lesdin/Maria, the Astral Keeper/@comment-1330314-20160903195545

This page is beautiful, the core idea is perfect League material, and most of the ideas here are excellent. We really need a LoL champion who can emulate Dark Souls/Bloodborne-style gameplay, and even in pure League terms you have an interesting light fighter concept with some cool mechanical hooks and an interesting playstyle. Some more minor issues aside, though, I have two complaints with the above blog post: the first is that it's not very easy to read, and it would be better to either put the lore and ability descriptions in separate tabs, or compress the lore bits under collapsible templates, and the second is that you have a few mechanics that run against each other, namely Maria's passive + Q and her ult, which have some anti-synergy (Quickening and her light fighter playstyle encourage her to avoid damage entirely and focus on building damage, Bloodbath encourages her to take damage and build tanky). Thoughts on each ability:
 * Quickstep is an interesting mechanic, and I love the idea of having a player work to constantly dodge incoming projectiles. I would, however, recommend you add something to this that would facilitate dodging (e.g. slowing projectiles down around Maria, including non-targeted projectiles), since otherwise the skillshot conversion in itself might be hard to notice and apply to its fullest. I would also tie this into a reward system, e.g. giving Maria a resource and have her gain some of that resource every time she dodged a projectile (Energy could mirror Bloodborne's stamina system), in order to really encourage the player to put themselves at risk, instead of using this purely for escaping uncomfortable situations.
 * Quickstep is simple, powerful ability, and I quite like it, though I think having four charges and/or 500 range per dash might be a bit too good (for reference, has 300 range). It's a great analogue to Dark Souls-style dodge rolling, and for that reason I'd support shifting Quickening completely into this ability, and giving Maria some other, perhaps damage-focused passive, since the dodge innate is clearly meant to be used mostly in conjunction with Quickstep.
 * I love the idea of a toggled ability that has an active on each toggle, and in that sense Hunter's Craft solves the issue with a lot of toggles usually only being worth leaving in one state. I don't think the toggled on steroid is all that interesting or contributive to Maria's kit, however, and for that reason I think it might be better to just make this ability a two-form active that would alternate effects with each casts, rather than a "true" toggle.
 * Bloodtinge's two-part effect is fantastic and encourages Maria to move in for the killing blow (plus the enemy-health scaling is kinda nice for anti-tank damage), but I think the effect might just have a tad too much CC. Either the initial stun or the second part's stun/knockdown/channel combo should probably go, and I'd advocate removing the first one and increasing the mark's duration, as you'd have more interactivity overall (the target would have a chance to escape Visceral Embrace's massive damage and crowd control, and you could even just extend its CC duration to 1-2 seconds).
 * Bloodbath is not my favorite ability. It's got a lot of stuff going on, including a lot of conditionals that I don't think really need to be there (e.g. Hunter's Craft gaining a slow, Visceral Embrace disabling the bleed on auto), but my biggest criticism, as mentioned above, is that its activation sort of runs contrary to the rest of Maria's playstyle: with her basic abilities, she's going to be building pure damage and trying to avoid enemy attacks as much as she can while engaging them at risky distances; but her ult only activates if she lets herself take damage, which also implies she'd have to build tankier just to be able to survive getting hit and continue fighting after that. I'd recommend a different active, or at least a different implementation of the bloodfire effect. You might want to look at how Maria makes a larger contribution to her team, for example: in your kit, she has a stun and good damage (and if you add bullet-time to Quickening, some situational projectile mitigation), but she otherwise operate mostly on her own. What if, for example, Bloodbath allowed all allies to make marked enemies bleed on autoattack? Maria could still use the ability to full effect in a lane duel, but would make a unique contribution in damage to her entire team in larger fights, and if you made this apply to jungle monsters (with a cap, though) she could even have a few more situationally interesting choices as well.

All in all, you have a great core kit that needs a few more adjustments, mainly for better self-synergy and interaction. You made a great choice in picking Bloodborne as a lore and gameplay reference, and if/when you work further on Maria you should definitely try to make its core dodge/shoot/precision strike gameplay translate as much as possible to League. I'm not the biggest or best judge of custom lore, but this looks pretty well-written for the most part. I think you need to explain a bit better whose point of view this is from at the start, perhaps give a bit more context (this is the world of Bloodborne, not League), and perhaps focus more on Maria than the one coming to see her (your lore bit stops right before her Astral Clock Tower boss fight, presumably), though it fits well with the game's atmosphere. Congratulations on the work you've put into Maria!