My Thoughts on Thunderlord's Decree (And How To Balance It!)

I think Thunderlord's Decree is a cool mastery. It provides burst champions with that little extra damage they need to get the job done. However, it also provides the same thing to other champions that shouldn't necessarily be getting those same benefits, and at little to no cost. Simply put, it's just too easy to proc. So here's my idea on how it should be changed.

1. Reduce the time to proc it from 3 seconds to 2 seconds. This gives you a smaller window to solidify the mastery as a BURST damage mastery rather than a trade mastery. Most trades last around 2-3 seconds, and you might not necessarily "burst" them with a combo but maybe throw an Orb of Deception, back off and throw in an auto attack a second later, and boom. Damage. It shouldn't be this lenient. You really should have to commit to get that damage, not half-heartedly harrass them for it.

2. Auto attacks should NOT proc Thunderlord's Decree. I think this is the second most important part. With such a large window as 3 seconds, it makes it WAY too easy. Most champions have enough attack speed (which really isn't much, if you consider that it procs when the first auto attack connects, effectively eliminating the attack speed factor for the first auto attack) to proc it with basic attacks alone. I'm almost certain that this is not how this mastery was intended to be utilized.

2.5) Damage-Over-Time ticks should not proc Thunderlord's Decree. This is sort of an extension of the last point, but especially when you consider that Thunderlord's deals damage in an area around the target, it really becomes a no-brainer. Unless you have some sort of blink or untargetablilty, that Malzahar is going to proc Thunderlord's Decree on you - not with his E, but with his W - and there's nothing you can do about it. At all.

I think Thunderlord's could be a great mastery, but nerfing the numbers is not the way to go about achieving this, because if everyone currently uses the tool and it suddenly becomes worse, then no one will use it at all. Instead, the criteria just needs to be tweaked a little. If it was geared more toward champions who actually do burst damage, then maybe assassins wouldn't be in such a bad spot and we wouldn't need ridiculous items like to make them happy again. There's no point in giving assassins a tool if everyone can use the same tool. It essentially cancels out the advantage that the assassin has because everyone else has the same advantage. What do you all think?