My thoughts on how champions should be designed and balanced

I don't know if there is no standard on Champion design for the Riot dev team, but from the looks of it their standards might as well be non-existent in some cases. In my opinion a well designed champion and champion skills are built in such a way that there is multiple interactions for both the champion user and their opponent. Good examples of such things could be 's **E **skill Event Horizon because the user has to line it up and time the skill but the enemy could juke out of the ring or stay in the middle and make it difficult for the Veigar user to hit them with his other skills. The point here is that there are multiple options for both the Veigar player, and their opponent. Most skillshots from mages are generally pretty well designed, allowing for multiple variations of use and, as the dev team calls it, counterplay.

Another an example of a well-designed skill would be 's ultimate, Pyroclasm. This ability has a random element but a smart brand player will choose the right moment to hit the enemy as many times as possible from bounces, on the flip side the enemy can stay spread out to minimize the effectiveness of Brand's Pyroclasm effect. You see, there is options on both sides so its about outsmarting your opponent and choosing the right moment. From the perspective of someone who plays Brand, watching a player a get a juicy 5 champion hit with it is something I savor.

Sadly things are not perfect everywhere, some abilities have 1-sided interactions that provide no method of counterplay or very limited options of counterplay. An example of an ability with no counterplay would be 's much hated Silver Bolts that do true damage and scale with a target's maximum hp. This is poorly designed because the counter to true damage is usually to build HP, but because it scales with HP there is no counter. This ability is particularly badly designed because while its suppose to be for killing tanky targets, it utterly decimates non-tanky targets and acts like a "crit" effect for Vayne, causing her to wipe the floor almost universally. This is also why Vaynes rush attack speed rather than the usual because her Silver bolts are her built in crit. I way to fix this issue would be to make her silver bolts do physical damage or make it do a flat unscaling amount of damage; I have third idea but I want to save that idea for another post.

An example of a poorly designed ability with very limited counterplay would be 's** W** skill Windwall. This ability's counterplay is that it has a long cooldown. That means while it is up, there is no player interaction on either side, effectively creating a "dead-zone" of action for a short span, this is coupled with the fact it blocks that a "wall-of-wind" should not block for a guy with no mana bar (blocking energy with wind, blocking Falling stars with wind). This is clearly an act of magic but the guy uses no mana to achieve it so that leads me to believe, one: this ability is a feat of flatulence, or two: this ability needs some changes.

A possible solution would be to make it disappear after it absorbs 1 projectile, like a spell shield. I don't think we should put a nerf on it though, rather rework it so there is interaction on both sides. Like my Vayne Silver Bolt fix #3 I wish to save my solution for another post.

EDIT: LInk to 2nd post about Vayne 3rd option and Yasuo W fix: 2nd Post)