Gameplay thoughts from a Skarner main

So, let's talk about Skarner.

After last year's mid season update, he was OP for like a total of three weeks. His new passive brought interesting gameplay to the table, but ultimately forces a mini game upon people that don't want to play it. Since then, I've found ways to make Skarner useful, but as a whole, he's an inconvenient champ for my teammates and he is literally only truly effective if he's in the jungle. (Not saying laning is impossible, but you can't utilize your spires, so far less than optimal)

While the execution of the spires is less than optimal, the concept (movement speed, mana regen and attack speed buff for maximum area and objective control) is still valid and interesting. Its main drawback is that it forces Skarner into the jungle, leaves him feeling weak anywhere else, and forces everybody to focus on something they didn't sign up for.

MY IDEA IS: why not change the Skarner passive so that he can summon crystals (complete with health) similarly to Illaoi tentacles and Zyra pants? It would take away the pressure on teammates and allow Skarner players to put more thought and skill into where they want to control and increase the gap between good Skarner players and bad ones.

After reading Skarner's new lore, this could be done in a number of ways. The first way would be to have him spawn crystals passively through his passive ability. Another would be to change his E to spawn crystals and either knock up out briefly impale people then spawn a crystal (like he does in the story) This would allow Skarner players to decide whether to use their valuable mana on creating new crystals on safe places or on attacking the opponent. The crystals themselves could be renamed to be life stones so that they have more thematic ties to Skarner.

Now to balance this, the area of effect for the crystals could be lowered, and the crystals could give a movement speed buff similar to Soraka, where Skarner gets a buff while moving towards them but not away from them, and likewise due to his connection to the soul stones, he could have vision over a small area when a stone is destroyed (or at least be aware of the destruction of the stone through a ping)

The idea hasn't been completely fleshed out, so I'm sure there are some flaws in the design. But I would love to hear your feedback on the idea and hopefully have Riot take note as I truly think this would be a better direction for Skarner

Thank you in advance for your feedback