Vel'koz, instead of buffing the damage on R...

From what I understand, the big complaint from Vel'koz players right now is that his R is a lot weaker when he hasn't researched a target. I don't think giving a straight damage buff to R really solves the problem since the high end also becomes much stronger to the point where a non-researched R that feels good would probably produce a researched R that is really OP. And obviously you can't have the old system where the ray constantly builds stacks or else it's always going to be mostly true damage.

What if it instead refreshed the duration of current stacks over the duration, and the last tick of damage added a single stack to anything it hit? (only on a full channel or maybe also on a canceled channel?). This allows him to R on targets in a tight grouping without being sad about losing his stacks over the duration of the channel, enemies in the laser at the end will be a little closer to a passive proc if he has abilities to follow up with, and enemies that were almost researched at the start still get a blast of true damage at the very end of the channel.

I still think researching targets would be far-and-away the better use case, but it would soften the difference as well as making it much better when used on groups (lasering multiple enemies is really fun!) as opposed to focusing on researched targets which generally means you proc passive on one guy and focus him down while ignoring his team mates.