User blog comment:Shikitora/Lunasa, the Tide of Ambition/@comment-6006137-20131221130517/@comment-10306517-20131221143108

Hi, thanks for commenting!

I designed Lunasa to be a rather unusual marksman, and one of my concerns with her was that she would be overly complicated. At the time of this writing, there are no manaless/energy-based ADCs in LoL, and for a good reason: they would have too much sustain and they'd just be able to poke people down for days without any consequences. That's just not fun to play against. So Lunasa's ammo system and range are a way to give her a clear disadvantage that her opponents can capitalize on.

Think about how a crossbow works in real life. Lunasa starts the game with 10 bolts in her quiver, or 10 charges, and gradually gains more as she levels. Every time she right-clicks on an enemy and auto-attacks them, she takes a bolt out of her quiver and fires it. If she has no bolts remaining in her quiver (no charges) she obviously can't fire any more shots. So if Lunasa tries to autoattack on an empty quiver, she'll instead pistol whip (crossbow whip?) her enemies at 200 range, effectively becoming a melee champ. Her ammoless attacks are still considered ranged to avoid coding problems with certain in-game items.

To sum it up, as long as Lunasa has ammo charges, her autoattacks have a range of 600. Otherwise, her basic attack range decreases to 200. She is always considered a ranged champion for the purposes of items like Tiamat and Runaan's Hurricane.

To answer your question about actually gaining the ammo charges, Lunasa will slowly reload her weapon and gain charges as long as she hasn't autoattacked or used an ability in the last 2 seconds. This is intended to make Lunasa players very mindful about last-hitting, harassing, and conserving ammo. Her Q ability, Impact, also gives her one extra charge upon use.