Fixing Swain's Healing: One Idea for the Rework

Swain’s healing is the most obvious contention about his current kit. It allows him to turn into a raid boss under the right conditions; that’s fun for the player, but it’s not fun for the opponents unless there’s some kind of counterplay. I want to make a proposal for his rework that gives it that counterplay.

Let me start by just giving you the idea, and then I’ll lead you through the thought process that led me to it so we can discuss it.

Swain siphons the life force out of his opponents and gets a % of his health and mana back when he gets a kill or assist. The % scales with level, not with AP. This would not apply to minion kills (Swain cannot heal from minions anymore).

Swain’s healing is pretty integral to his kit, so I don’t want it removed. Instead, I want it balanced around clear success and failure cases. Right now, Swain presses R, and Swain heals. I think this ability needs counterplay by allowing the opponent to kill Swain before he can heal. This gives a bigger swing between the success and failure cases with Swain’s ult. It also removes the weird interaction Swain has with enemy minion waves, since fighting in the wave is actually good for Swain, while it’s bad for almost every other champ in the game.

My opinion is that his passive is the perfect place to put this. Using dark magic to siphon life force out of dead enemies is still pretty in line with Swain’s current kit, and his passive already restores mana. We’re getting rid of the “Dangerous Game” mastery, so let’s put it in Swain’s kit, instead, eh?!

This way, Swain would have to kill enemies to get that sweet, sweet nectar of life. This allows it to be countered by things like shields. And living. I would also propose that we remove the AP scaling to limit, but not eliminate, snowball from that part of his kit. I would start at 2% per level for champs. I would not give it back on minion kills. This could also be scaled more like Garen passive, instead of linear with every level, if that works better. I’m more interested in the overall design philosophy of “health back on kills” than I am in the nuts and bolts; you can increase or decrease the % or change the scaling as necessary to balance it if the idea is good.

Let’s look at an example for why I think this is a good idea. We’ll look at two Swains; the current one, with no changes, and the “new” one I propose here. For the purposes of this discussion, let’s just say he has the new passive and no healing on his ult anymore. This will allow us to thought experiment the design with as little complication as possible. Let’s assume both teams are roughly equally competent, as well. Things obviously change when one team is much better than the other.

Right now, when I play Swain (I play him mid a lot), a common strategy is to press R and run at the enemy marksman into the middle of their team. I typically do this after landing a sick W, which roots them. I lose most of my health on the advance. BUT that’s okay, because I have Zhonya’s Hourglass. I press “2”, but this is where the story diverges for the old and new passives.

With old passive, I sit there and drain their entire team for dayz; meanwhile, my team advances (if they aren’t scrubs) and do some cleanup while I heal, and when I come out, I can help mop up whoever isn’t dead already. Even if my team leaves me hanging and the enemy marksman doesn’t die, I come out of hourglass healthy and they have to waste more cool downs and attacks on me to keep me from healing to full and escaping. Even if I botch my engage, it costs the enemy team quite a bit to kill me, so my team can sometimes still win the ensuing fight. The success case, where I kill the enemy marksman, and the failure case, where I don’t, are only slightly different (provided I have competent teammates).

With this new passive, things can be very different. If I kill the enemy marksman, it’s all good, and plays out much the same way. That’s good and healthy; if you can’t protect your marksman from Swain, you should probably lose that fight. But, in this case, if I don’t kill the enemy marksman, I get no heals (remember, no heals from ult here). This means that I will die quickly when my hourglass timer runs out, and the other team can continue on in the 4v5 with little penalty from my botched engage. That’s how it should be.

I know that Swain will get reworked in other parts of his kit, of course. The point here is to brainstorm a healthier way to express the “spellvamp” fantasy that Swain has; it’s something that we players love about him, and I think many of us would love to keep it if possible. It’s also a relatively pretty unique passive, which is a bonus.

Anyway, please chime in! Swain mains, what do you think? Swain haters, would that be a better version of Swain? Riot, did you already playtest this and it’s terrible? If I'm wrong, let's talk about why I'm wrong, and see what we learn.