Just out of curiosity, but what are your thoughts on the early game phase of last hitting?

It's a difficult to understand concept that is not immediately obvious (Burden of Knowledge), plus it's also a matter of conflicted purpose as the goal is to destroy the enemy base, but it's very unwise to work towards that goal early on. And indeed, it's not really clear when that transition takes place.

Greatness. I have never read something like this before and it is a real eye opener. It should be stickied in champion feedback or something .

Oh my god, thank you for posting this. Bolded for emphasis.

"Or We Could **** the Player!!1111oneoneone"

Ugh. This is one of the reasons I stopped playing Guild Wars. When the game balancers started taking powerful skills in the metagame and nerfing the everloving **** out of them to the point that they were completely unusable for anything, it was clear that they didn't care anymore and were just insulting their community.

great OP, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and can learn a lot from it as a programmer =)

Biggest problem with this I see is now you have 2 summoner spells AND flash. So, you can run Teleport, Ghost, and Flash.

I like this thread. It's good to know we have thoughtful designers, even if I disagree with Zileas sometimes. (I usually agree with him though).

Another question:

How viable is Swain to you? Pure damage casters just don't seem to bring anything to the table compared to other casters. Like Morello said, casters are bursty with secondary effects. Swain (Also Karthus and Ryze) don't really have any of this. The only thing they offer is damage. But in nearly every case you're better off with a ranged carry instead.

Do you view this as a problem? And are the only solutions to give casters like Swain some kind of support ability or somehow make them into carries?

To clarify: Nearly any team in the game would prefer Morgana over a Swain. Morgana has very similar playstyle. She sets up with a bind and plays aggressively with her ulti and pool. Swain tries to do this, but without a black shield to help him or his allies he just kind of dies or if he's invested in survivability items doesn't do much damage. (Which defeats the purpose of a damage caster)

I'd say it's "don't level me at all, then don't use me at all, because my 20% damage increase is absolutely useless on a champ that deals next to nill damage and is best at being a below-average offtank". Slightly underpowered ftw.

Q and W skills both have nice, reliable damage, and leveling them increases your utility a lot, and Nevermove is also good for farming and has a good range. Leveling Torment makes you unable to farm, unable to do (non-laughable) damage and decreases your utility. It's also in almost melee range to make things more fun for you when you absolutely must start feeding the enemy team. Oh and it's also the worst scaling nuke in the game (not because of the ap ratio).

Torment is a wrong choice ability (picking it early is wrong, because it's useless, picking it late is wrong because it scales awfully). Percentage damage increase is for autoattackers and for aoes. It's simply worthless on burst nukers (did someone mention awful scaling - the 20% gets double mr reduction, making it scale twice as bad as base ability damage). Just make it a "Fireball" ability, that deals flat instant damage and be done with it, if you want simple. Or replace it with a tanking ability imho. Or give us what we want and what we were promised - a trimmed down maledict...

Farmville uses incremental changes vs revenue to design. That's not what we do. They'll never find dramatic innovations within a game with that approach, only incremental ones. Experts are good at their jobs... Zynga isn't really big on trusting them to find new maximums... only at finding local maximums with data. But because Facebook is so underutilized, it has worked for them. From their perspective, their approach destroys their competition, so why take a higher risk 'innovation' approach? I agree with them -- in their situation and market. But that's not what we are about, because we have different staff compositions, different culture, and a different market that demands different things.