Interesting ideas for the Mage update

Vel'koz is pretty balanced and fun. What he lacks is a meaningful distiction between Burst mage and Poke mage. His ulti is long range poke, but his normal abilities are for burst. So there is some contradiction there i feel. I'd say push his "geometry" feel over the top with his skills.

Vlad should use blood as a resource. Blood is a resource that grow up to 100 whenever Anyone in the range of the passive get hit or die. Abilities still costs health, but your Magic lifesteal is increased by +X% based on how much blood you have. Casting the ultimate at 100 Blood will deplete your blood meter and add an additional bleeding magical damage dot on the enemies hit by the ult. Blood meter cannot refill for a short period of time after that.

His abilities are also quite binary. His pool is cool (but need new graphics), his Q is very simple, and his E is just bad. I'd say give him this E:

• Tides of blood: You put on the ground a (medium range circle) pool of blood that grows in size for the next 4 seconds. All the enemies that pass through get their movement speed reduced by 30% and take (little) magical damage every second. After 4 second the pool disappear.

With this change you could transform Vladimir into the teamfighter mage for excellence. Manage your blood meter and get at 100 before a big fight start, and with the new E and R you try to hit as many nemies as possible while sustaining yourself.

: Cassio should be the Damage over time master of the game. Not a machinegun mage. Her q is nice and should be her core spell and the one that gives the most dps. How?: Her E should still be the spell that we know but now a line skillshot (with longer range!) dealing much less damage having a higher cooldown, btu with this effect: Enemies hit by this abilities get all the Damage over time from cassiopea incrased by +X% for the next 5 seconds. So you are much mroe reliant on poisoning the enemies and then giving them the dot amplifier with the E if you hit. The rest of the kit is okay in my opinion. but i would put her W with a charge system, able to put more pool of poison but also less big zones.

Her Q sucks for me. and she should be all about getting the consistent damage from the plants. Let her be able to put many more plants and do less burst damage.

Malzahar has a toxic ultimate, and lack distiction (what does he do? dot, burst, minions spawining). In my eyes he should be the dude that summons void creatures to his help to fast push turrets down. Kinda like a necromancer but with the void theme. (he also need a visual update)

Open void gates that spawn minions every X seconds, and stuff like this. His ulti should be something like this: targeted ground ability: All the enemy minions in this zone now fight for you and change color (the power of the dark side i guess, or the power of the void). Dat would be sick.