[Skarner follow-up] New passive direction - what are your thoughts?

Hey everyone!

One thing we've been talking a lot about is how we want to make sure is followed-through on to correct some things you guys called out in his rework. I won't recap the whole discussion as it's long, but our goals are;

1. Ensure Skarner's pattern is healthy, can be balanced, and allows for meaningful choices when fighting against him

2. Create (or somehow restore) Skarner's identity that players miss now - mainly that of the "inevitable predator", freight-train style play.

3. Make sure Skarner's strengths and weaknesses make sense.

With that, I wanted to shop two different ideas to players and get a read on which direction seems like the better set of tradeoffs to satisfy these goals. To be clear, this must be a tradeoff to meet goals 1) and 3), but which one we choose is heavily influenced by 2).

In both versions, his old passive would be removed, but the passive would be a passive on the Q (so it stays the same) Listed below. Other skill cooldowns likely lowered to match the fact that they don't get the passive. This keeps him out of total feast-or-famine, but allows some scaling/changes in power based on performance. In both versions:

Q: Skarner gains A/B/C% movement speed as he stacks up Q hits, for X seconds. This will help him stick when he reaches a target.

Now, for the two passive directions we're looking at.

Direction 1: Skarner is a premier freight-train with great stickiness and good control. His tradeoff is his damage pattern is less bursty/longer time-to-kill,

New Passive: Crystal Poison (name tbd) Spells apply stacks of poison to the enemy. After X stacks, the next auto-attack will do a (short) stun and bonus damage.

1. We're stoked on this because it adds into his training pattern
2. We have a cool animation and effect we can repurpose to make this awesome (stings you with his tail!)
3. Likely more healthy with his natural transition into late-game initiator

Direction 2: Skarner is a damage-oriented fighter with low utility. Gets no more control than on live, and does damage until transitioning into a late-game pick-tank.

New passive: After X spell hits, Skarner's next attack does +damage and heals him for Y.

1. Likely true damage
2. The more he trains, the more damage he does
3. Probably gets really bad if behind because damage is more granular and dependent on snowballing.

So this is what we're talking about right now. I wanted to come ask what you think about these - I have my opinion, but since we want to make this right, we wonder if damage, or the ability to train/control is MORE important to Skarner fans or potential Skarner fans.