RIOT,

I personally do lots of looking at champion design principles and ways in which champions are developed as this is of great interest to me as I hope to be a part of the industry some day. I have been playing your game for sometime and I have noticed a few design flaws in champions but most are rather small and for the most part have gone unnoticed for so long that changing the champion or the skill that presents the issue would be too game changing.

However, one skill stands apart from all of this and I believe can be changed with out any major hassel or critical balancing factors. This is Zilean's Rewind skill. This skill is in violation of one of the most critical factors of champion design and skill design: a player should feel the freedom to level any skill at any time and not be directly punished by doing so, nor deny the player the use of another skill (which is either passive or has already been invested in) by choosing one skill over another, nor should any skill require another to allow for it to be used.

These principles exist so that the player is allowed the freedom to level however they please and provide a rewarding incentive to level any and all skills while providing and unbiased decision factor.

As with Zilean this is not the case, as by leveling Rewind, the player experiences no benefit and the player feels cheated and thus violates the design principle as it needs another skill to be invested in to be effective.

I now humbly suggest that you add a passive effect to the skill to remedy this situation. I have come up with some simple but possible ideas:

1) Add a mana/5 passive effect that will get stronger with each level invested in the skill

2) Add a passive CDR effect (keeping with his theme) or a possible CDR aura effect that can remain active until his skill goes on cooldown from use. This would make the player have to choose if they want the benefit quickly for themselves or moderately for the whole team.

3) A flat AP boost that would go up with each level invested. It would be tempting to invest to get that little bit more AP.

I would like to know what you think about this or if you even view it as a design flaw.

Thank you,
ThatGuyTheres

Common sense should tell you to not grab it at level 1, just as you shouldn't take hawkshot as Ashe at level one. Many champions in LoL have skills that just aren't picked at level 1. The game isnt meant to be balanced around the first 2 minutes of the game.

I applaud the effort you've made and it's clear that you've put some thought into the problem of getting rewind at level 1..

You may want to think about your solutions to see if any of those actually solves the 'levelling rewind at level 1 and having a useless skill' as only part of one solution is actually relevant - whereas the others all are just buffs that don't address the original problem.

I think that what he meant was leveling Rewind past 1 point in the skill until there are absolutely no other choices is punishing. All of his solutions address that, as opposed to picking the skill at level 1, which will always be useless, as it only has a bonus for directly affecting his ability to use other skills.

If xerath gets his root at level 1 he has no other spells to cast to use with it so its a useless skill. Its not a design flaw at all, certain characters are ment to be played certain ways. We don't want to promote new people being worse than they have to and making bad ideas, the old malady was removed because it was a noob trap, i think those are worse than not bieng able to take rewind at lvl 1