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My Crack at a Malzahar Gameplay Update (moved from Concepts & Creations cuz Rito told me to)

Tiniest Turtle··2 votes·905 views

Hello there beautiful readers who I have no doubt will take a steaming dump on my dreams! Amumu How are you doing today?

When I'm bored I like to reimagine the kits of different champions. This time I landed on Malzahar just because his gameplay leaves something to be desired for me. I don't find a lot of engagement in it, ya know? If I were to describe the feeling I get while playing him, it'd be like walking up to a dude, clicking a few buttons, and then just standing still while they melt. Sometimes it's satisfying, but often I feel like my abilities do all the work themselves and I'm just throwing them out there. Like there's not enough interaction with the mechanics of my kit.

Hopefully this will remedy that somehow by adding some more obvious combos in his kit, or something. I'd be fine with waiting back while a dude melts if Malz were like, say, Talon. Talon sets up his major damage over time by hitting a combo first. Malzahar seems to just stack different forms of dots. Anyways I hope you get the sentiment. I'm looking for more satisfaction from pulling off a combo.

item 2045Passive: Malefic Visions
Units affected by Malzahar's abilities are marked for 2.5 seconds. Malzahar's basic attacks trigger the mark to inflict them with Malefic Visions, dealing magic damage over 4 seconds. Malzahar regains mana when an enemy inflicted with the visions dies.

_It's like Lux and Swain had a baby. To make up for the visions not spreading on death, he can trigger it on numerous people with good spell usage. Unlike Lux,  Malefic Visions is meant to be a large portion of where his damage comes from, as opposed to bonus damage for putting yourself at risk. Malzahar wants to be getting this off to be doing adequate damage._

item 3630 Q: Nullify Malzahar opens up two portals to the void perpendicular to the direction he's facing, dealing magic damage and Silencing enemies caught in between after a brief delay.

Oldie but goodie screw your spells button. Core to my image of Malzahar being the sustained damage mage that counters burst damage mages. The only new element added is that this can put your passive mark on a LOT of guys.

item 3512 W: Void Swarm Malzahar periodically stores a Voidling charge, up to 2.

Activate to summon a Voidling for 12 seconds that deals physical damage. Voidlings do not apply or trigger the mark from Malefic Visions, but will Frenzy when a foe inflicted with Malefic Visions is nearby. Frenzied Voidlings lock on to enemies with Visions, prioritizing champions, only changing targets when their target dies or loses Malefic Visions. They gain 100% movement speed and attack speed while Frenzied, and their first attack against an enemy with Malefic Visions summons another Voidling with its remaining duration near Malzahar, up to 6.

Basically the same old Void puppies, although hopefully more simple to understand in their behaviour. Ideally damage would be balanced around the lack of damage differentiation between minions, monsters, and champions.

summoner 12E: Void Shift
Malzahar Phases Out after 1.5 seconds, becoming untargetable and ignoring unit collision for 1.5 seconds at the cost of 15% movement speed. Taking damage or crowd control during the 1 second wind up, or issuing a basic attack while Phased Out will cancel Void Shift Early. Upon being cancelled or ending normally, Malzahar's next attack within 5 seconds is empowered. This attack deals bonus magic damage to its target and applies a slow that decays over 1.5 seconds. Two additional bolts prioritizing enemies marked by Malefic Visions and champions are also sent out, dealing the main attack's bonus magic damage and applying on-hit effects. The primary and secondary bolts both apply, and trigger Malefic Vision's mark.

Fair amount of utility here. Untargetability that allows movement and spell casting is likely hilariously too strong, but hey, let's try it. At least if you're attentive you can shut it down before-hand. This ability's cooldown and mana cost would be on the high side to account for its power. The Phase Out supports his ability to deny your burst while hopefully melting you. The empowered attack has a number of uses. Hit a few people with Q? Trigger the mark on three people with the triple attack. Slow and trigger Visions on a guy so your Voidlings can have their way with them. Hell, slow a dude just to hit your Q or ult.

item 3643 R: Nether Gate Open a Gate to the Void after a delay based on the proximity to Malzahar (think Soraka Q) Enemies in the area when the Gate opens take magic damage. For the next 4 seconds enemies in the area take additional magic damage over time, and are significantly slowed. Opening the Gate on top of enemies marked by Malefic Visions will stun them and trigger the mark.

Casting Void Swarm on the Gate summons a Super Voidling from it that has double health and crits every 3rd attack. Additional Voidlings summoned from Super Voidling attacks will also be summoned from the Gate, but will not be Super Voidlings. Malzahar can have 2 Super Voidlings in addition to 6 regular ones.

So in summary, hit a Q or E to mark a few people, ult on top of them to stun them and trigger visions, and enjoy watching them trying to crawl slowly out of your big damage over time zone so they can shield themselves while your awesome Super Voidlings go off on them. Even when they get out they still have to deal with ongoing Vision damage and a Voidling army.

There you go. Feel free to tell me how bad it is. Instead of the interaction between his ult and his Voidlings, I had initially had it as a no shield zone. Basically while enemies were in the zone, any damage they took would bypass any shields on them. The idea being that his enemies couldn't rely on temporary health points protecting them while they bursted you. You would just tell them to shut up with Q, dodge them once the silence wore off with E if they hadn't aa'd you, then run up to them for a quick ult on their face to stun them while Voidlings chow down on them. If they wanted to try to survive, nope no shields. Instead they just have to deal with a much meaner swarm. Fortunately, the whole initial damage and stun is perfectly evadable. Sometimes all Malzahar will end up getting from his ult will be a zoning area that allows him to hang back since his Voidling will be coming out of the portal instead of him. That and some BAMF Voidlings. Other times though it could be a 5 man stun, triggering Malefic Visions, slowing them all in the area while they take extra damage, and having group of 6 void puppies and 2 void doggos totally hack them up. Potentially a veeeerry terrifying ult that can melt people with a good plays made around its mechanics.

2 Comments

Stephenizgod2 votes

Forcing a good majority of Malzahar's damage to be based on Auto-Attacking is not a great idea. Unlike Kayle or Teemo, this kit does not reward you for building attack speed. In order to maximize this you would need to build Nashors and Ruunans on him, which is 2 item spots that don't really help the rest of his kit. Your E does not benefit from AS and it seems would benefit more from just raw AP since it is a single empowered auto attack. The Voidlings don't benefit from that either, neither does the ultimate.

I don't like the current Voidlings at all, I don't like the Voidlings before this change. They are just not working out and now that New Yorick is out, Malzahar's place as swarm host has been filled and better than he ever could. We should move away from spawning multiple Voidlings at this point because he just can't do it as well. Your Super Voidling is a good idea but I don't particularly like your ultimate. I believe his Suppress to be core and iconic to Malzahar. I understand it can feel overpowered or toxic, but it has tons of counterplay and ways of dealing with it, even in a 1v1.

Overall I think you have a lot of interesting in this, honestly i do, but I personally don't think its a great Malzahar concept. Could be just me though.

Things that I like about this concept:

The Super Voidlings I like because instead of summoning a ton of Voidlings, its just one powerful one that can summon more. Like I said above, I think Yorick fills the horde master role better than Malzahar. Trying to force that idea back onto Malzahar will just end up feeling like a cheap copy of Yorick. However Super Voidlings are a different story, if they worked similar to how his old Passive use to work.

The Void Shift ability is interesting for sure, similar to Vlad but with a different use. In its current form I don't think it fits so well on Malzahar though, but I do think if you tweaked it slightly it could probably work pretty well.

Tiniest Turtle1 votes

In response to STEPHENIZGOD. Didn't want to quote because that would double the length of this comment.

I'm going to try to address your concerns.

Firstly, on his passive and attack speed. I like to think of it like Lux. Optimizing for maximum passive procs with items like Runnans does NOT mean optimized damage. In every scenario except for maybe clearing waves, he can get his passive on everyone that counts. He doesn't have to rely on his auto attacks and his attack speed to trigger Malefic Visions on every champion in a fight. In a one on one trade, I think that at the speed you'd use abilities, your attack speed would be sufficient to proc the mark every time it came up, which would be from three possible sources. In a smaller Skirmish, a Q -> E combo can get it on up to three targets, although you would be sacrificing one potential proc. In a full on 5v5 teamfight a well aimed Q into R puts it on the whole enemy team, and Q's cd is low enough to do the Q -> E combo before or after.

I see Malz as more of a mage best suited for focusing on a single target, so losing some potential damage to deal with numerous enemies could be an aspect of his kit to consider an intended weakness. Alternatively his passive could be changed so that enemies with Malefic Visions that receive damage from Q, E, or R gate have the duration refreshed in order to only require him to proc the mark once, and sustain it with the rest of his abilities. I don't like that version the best though. Extended trading could be the strength of his passive, Hitting an ability and weaving in an auto on his lane opponent every so often to sustain the Voidling Frenzy. His W would honestly be the best form of sustained damage he has. Normally a full on assault of 2 Voidlings on the same target would deal about as much as a passive proc, and a hell of a lot more if the full 6 are Frenzied on the same guy. Perhaps not applying Malefic Visions to too many people would be best, seing as how you might want your Voidlings to focus a single target. That means that once Malzahar's Q cooldown goes lower than 4 seconds from cdr, spamming it off cooldown means missing out on passive procs. Does that mean that you don't want to buy cdr on Malz? Not necessarily, just that another aspect of his gameplay would be spacing out abilities so as not to waste his passive. Leblanc's current passive has this same kind of limitation. Ideally though you would get more DAMAGE from waiting to use Q to trigger another Visions, but if you want the Silence more then so be it. While playing Malz I don't even know if you would really put this much thought even into using his passive, your Q cooldown's low enough that all you'd really be considering would likely be, "I'll wait to use this until Visions has worn off so I can apply it again." Which is a negative, but doesn't mean it has to be removed.

On Voidlings. I agree that Malz and Yorick are now competing for design space with their simple AI horde summoning. Although I see Voidlings as a core part of Malzahar's identity and much as Ghouls are to Yorick. The difference to me is that with Yorick they're like the centre of attention... but with Malz they're a glorified thematic damage over time ability that interacts with Malefic Visions. He's the minion-mancer that isn't the 'I have a swarm of minions and that's what I do' guy, but the 'I do crazy dots, one of which is a swarm of minions, oh and you can't burst me' guy.

On Surpression. I honestly just want this gone from the game. The principal of there being a type of CC that leaves you with absolutely nothing you can do about it once you have it is just something I don't want to exist. To my knowledge you can't even use items or summoner spells to cleanse it from yourself. Anyways, I'm not too keen on my ult for him either, but I feel like it's a good ability for what it does for him and his team. It interacts with his passive, Q, W, and to a lesser extent, his E to be a big hitting move that ties his kit together. I would rather have it as a kind of stand alone ability that works with his kit in a more elegant fashion than ALL OF YOUR ABILITIES SUPPORT OR ARE SUPPORTED BY THE USE OF THIS ABILITY. It just makes the ultimate kind of daunting to me. You can't just ult, you have to first make sure all of your abilities are off cooldown if you want to make it anything more than aoe damage and a slow. Maybe an ult that does rely heavily on the rest of your kit to become something amazing isn't so bad though. What would your ideas be?

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