[Champion Concept] Erasmus, the Shining Paragon, revealed

#Erasmus

I got into a conversation about vision-based champions, and it occurred to me that supreme vision would probably work best on a really fragile melee carry. So, let's hop into the lore and kit, and I'll follow it up with reasoning.

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###Abilities

Passive:

Orb of Luminance — Erasmus's autoattacks create an aura of vision around him, revealing an area that expands as he attacks champions, including inside brush. The aura quickly recedes when Erasmus is out of combat. Additionally, Erasmus has no maximum attack speed.

Q:

Lambent Step — Erasmus's next autoattack or Scintillating Spear marks and reveals the target. For the next few seconds, he may reactivate this ability to dash to the marked target, consuming the mark and granting Erasmus bonus Attack Damage for a short duration.

W:

Speed of Light — (Passive) Erasmus gains Attack Speed.
(Active) For a few seconds, Erasmus slows all projectiles within his Orb of Luminance. Projectiles aimed at Erasmus within a small radius lose their tracking, and dissipate if dodged. Erasmus also gains a massive Movement Speed bonus.

E:

Scintillating Spear — Erasmus fires a narrow pulse of searing light from his spear, dealing physical damage to and slowing the first enemy hit. If that unit is within his Orb of Luminance, Scintillating Spear deals true damage, and the slow is increased.

R:

Radiant Glory — Erasmus overawes a nearby enemy champion with his power, causing them to be unable to see anything but him for a moderate duration that is extended by remaining in combat with Erasmus. The target also takes bonus physical damage from Erasmus's attacks.

###Gameplay

Erasmus is an agile sustained-damage fighter whose damage is coupled with tactical vision supremacy. He thrives in skirmishes, particularly in the jungle or near brush, where his enhanced battlefield awareness is most relevant. He excels at picking off isolated targets, and, as the game wears on, he transforms into an assailant of unmatched speed and evasiveness. ####Mid Lane Erasmus is best run in mid lane thanks to his fragility and weak early damage. He can farm safely with the low cooldown on Scintillating Spear, and his strong base stats allow him to farm well under tower if the lane pushes. Maintaining a large Orb of Luminance will provide a skilled Erasmus with advance warning of ganks, as well as empowering Scintillating Spears. If Erasmus can mark an opponent with Lambent Step, he can use Speed of Light to ensure a very lopsided trade.

Once Erasmus reaches level six and unlocks Radiant Glory, he becomes a terrifying roamer. He can use Lambent Step with Scintillating Spear to close on enemies from extreme range, and blinding a foe with Radiant Glory renders them all but defenseless to Erasmus's teammates. Erasmus can also hunt the enemy jungler, using his Orb of Luminance and Speed of Light to avoid enemy laners coming to assist.

####Teamfights Once Erasmus gets the items to stack up his attack speed, he becomes a veritable dervish. Erasmus wants to attack anyone he can to keep his Orb of Luminance large enough to give his team perfect tactical information wherever he may go. Lambent Step allows him to reset his positioning as needed, and the long mark duration at later levels allows surprising engages and disengages. Though Erasmus has little CC, Radiant Glory can still cripple nearly any target.

Since Erasmus focuses his itemization on increasing his sustained damage, he's very reliant on Speed of Light to remain alive in the middle of fights. Speed of Light lets Erasmus and his teammates dodge skillshots with ease. He can even evade autoattacks or other seeking projectiles — particularly useful because an enemy under the effects of Radiant Glory may have no choice but to attack Erasmus. When Speed of Light runs out, Erasmus loses most of his defenses, so he may need to retreat until its cooldown finishes unless he's already killed or driven off everyone who could lock him down.

####Playing with Erasmus Though Erasmus's late-game damage is considerable, it's matched by his team-wide utility. Orb of Luminance is incredibly useful for all his teammates. It gives advance warning of flanking foes, prevents enemies from using brush to their advantage, and provides perfect information of escape routes for clean-up. When Erasmus activates Speed of Light, the utility of Orb of Luminance grows even more, providing major safety from skillshots. However, Orb of Luminance is centered around Erasmus himself, so an Erasmus who gets too far ahead of his team deprives them of his unique utility.

####Playing against Erasmus Almost all of Erasmus's power is contingent on his being able to move freely. Nearly all his damage comes through his melee autoattack, and most of his defense comes from the evasiveness offered by Speed of Light, so CC, particularly point-and-click CC, is instrumental in bringing him down. Many common tactics, such as ducking into brush to throw off pursuit, are ineffective against Erasmus, so adjust your plans accordingly.

In lane, abuse Erasmus's weak early game to force him away from farm and slow his itemization. You can even tank his Scintillating Spears to prevent him from farming safely from range. Be careful, however, that the Spear wasn't primed with Lambent Step, or else Erasmus can follow up with a surprising amount of damage. If Erasmus uses Radiant Glory on you, back away from him to avoid his bonus damage and to shorten the duration of the debuff. Be careful, however, that you don't let him corral you into his waiting teammates.

###Design

####Why a Melee Carry? My goal in designing Erasmus was to create a fair and satisfying take on a vision-based champion. The obvious role for such a champion is support, since supports are already heavily involved in the vision game and are thought of as being heavily utility oriented. The problem with a vision support, however, is that vision offers a phenomenal amount of hard to appreciate power, and power often without counterplay. It's hard to appreciate the ganks you avoid before they even happen, the bushes you don't walk into, the opportunities opened by seeing the enemy jungler on the opposite side of the map. To make something that feels strong, you'd have to make something that is broken.

But there's another aspect of vision, distinct from the strategic vision offered by wards and Hawkshot. Tactical vision: battlefield awareness. Currently, this is best exemplified on Quinn's Heightened Senses, but everyone's used it when they drop a quick ward in a bush to keep attacking a fleeing enemy. Thanks to its more limited scope and more direct effects, the power of tactical vision is far more, er, visible than that of strategic vision, so that's what I chose to base my character around.

There's two main reasons I don't want to put this on a support. Supports are the most engaged in the vision game, but they deal in strategic vision, which serves a rather different role. If the same character has a kit that deals with a superficially similar mechanic, one or the other is more likely to be misused. It's like how Kog's old Q was a problem in his role and kit, because it was so short-ranged that he shouldn't ever be in position to use it. Sure, it's damage on a kit that wants to deal damage, but it functions differently from the rest of the kit and will punish you if you try to use it in the same way.

Additionally, there needs to be some risk to attaining this level of battlefield awareness, but supports can often just hang back and provide utility from the backlines. There's not much gameplay here for either team. So our vision champion must be incentivized to get into the middle of things. An tank might be encouraged to dive into, but most tanks would be more concerned with strategic vision. As Yasuo showed, melee carries are a natural fit for tactically important utility abilities, because they're the class most in need of fallback patterns should they fail to snowball. I decided to try melee carry.

####Crafting the abilities I came up with Erasmus's passive and ult first. Orb of Luminance is an easy to read implementation of battlefield awareness, and gating it based on his attacks seemed a good way to tie it into his playstyle. If Erasmus isn't in melee, he's not producing his teamwide utility. It also gives him the backup plan of building bruisery. He'll produce a smaller Orb of Luminance, and won't do as much damage, but he can still provide his teamwide utility more reliably on less gold. His ult is another tactical vision control ability I've had kicking around inside my head for a while. To the target, it would appear that as the rest of the map fades to shadows, Erasmus himself would appear as a veritable avatar of light. In practice, I expect it would function as a sort of inverse Poppy ult, forcing the target to focus only Erasmus or flee.

His W came next. Tactical vision was strong, but there should be more in Erasmus's kit to highlight that strength. He also needed some means of staying alive as well as some actual steroids to function as a melee carry. Slowing projectiles and dodging seeking ones really conveys the sort of hyperawareness his kit supports. It also lets him play the positioning game that's so important to having melee work. Move Speed would help to actually take advantage of that, and ties in nicely with the bullet-time feel of the ability. Since he has a prominent speed oriented skill, I figured his steroids should be primarily Attack Speed oriented, so I added into his passive that he has uncapped attack speed and gave him major bonus attack speed on Speed of Light. I'd also give him extremely high base attack speed, so attack speed items would be more effective on him.

Lambent Step server to further enhance Erasmus's mobility, and I think ties in surprisingly well with his kit. On most characters, this would be an extremely risky ability to activate if, say, the opponent flashes over the wall. But on Erasmus, if he's been able to keep up his Orb of Luminance, he can know exactly what he's leaping into. I think in practice the ability would be very complex to use optimally.

Erasmus's E, Scintillating Spear, was the hardest to come up with, though it filled a role I should have realized sooner that he needed. Erasmus's early game is very weak, since his steroids don't kick in until he's majorly itemized, and his survivability is on a long cooldown. He needs some way to safely farm in lane if he's not to just get bullied completely out. Scintillating Spear offers that, along with some impressive mobility in conjunction with Lambent Step. The bonus to it if the unit struck is within his Orb of Luminance is there to provide additional incentive to keep the Orb large even outside of situations where the tactical vision is useful. I think it really ties the kit together nicely.

###Lore Sketch

I haven't figured out all of Erasmus's lore yet, but here's what I have in mind.

As a young man seeking a purpose, Erasmus joined a cult, the Way of Light, that preached self-knowledge, oneness with the universe, and the cleansing power of light. As he rose through the ranks and his devotion grew, he was puzzled that the elders of the Way viewed him with suspicion and at times hostility. Seeking to find some reason for this, he turned his perception inwards to the cult and found that the entire religion was actually the front for an assassin's guild.

He reported his discovery to the Demacian Royal Guard, who shut down the Way of Light and arrested its leaders. Erasmus's faith remained surprisingly unshaken by the fact that his source of guidance was not about inner peace and charity but rather about killing people for money. He realized that even though his teachers were corrupt, the morals and ideals they paid lip service to could be put to use to uplift the fallen, salve the wounded, and bring virtue to the world. So Erasmus reforged the Way of Light in the image of what it always pretended to be.

"Virtue lies not in the light, but in it's wielder."

So that's Erasmus, my first champion designed for this forum. If you all like, I could come up with some sample VO lines, or ballpark some numbers on the skills. How does he look overall? Did I fulfill what I set out to do? Does Erasmus seem fun to play as and fair to play against?