Suggestions to make Malphite's Graphite Shield feel less bland and awful?
It's just a free 10% maximum health shield if you haven't taken any damage within the last 10/8/6 seconds, which is kinda counterintuitive to what a Tank is supposed to be, someone meant to stay in the fight for as long as possible soaking damage, not someone who has to run away for X seconds for their shield to recharge.
You'd think that with a continuously refreshing shield ability it'd be useful during the laning phase, right? But if your lane opponent keeps poking you, the shield won't recharge, meaning you have to step away from your minion wave for 10 seconds just to have a passive.
All it really is late game, is a 10% maximum health shield on engage. Nothing more. Until the teamfight is over, the passive doesn't serve any purpose.
Odyssey: Extraction helped it a bit by making it so ability hits and basic attacks reduced the cooldown of it, but obviously that was required for the amount of enemies you had to face in the mode at once. It would probably be broken in the actual game.
I have some ideas to make it feel less awful whilst also trying to make it less bland.
#A. Make it so taking damage doesn't reset the entire cooldown back to 10/8/6, but just adds 1 second to it, up to a cap of the original cooldown.
Say you're level 3 with 3 seconds left from your Granite Shield to come off cooldown and you get hit by one basic attack. Normally, it would go all the way back to 10 seconds, but with this change, it'll just make it so it now takes 4 seconds for Granite Shield to come off cooldown. If you keep taking damage, it'll take more and more seconds for it to come off, but it will never go over 10 seconds (the total duration it takes for Granite Shield to cooldown might exceed 10 seconds, but only if you keep taking damage). This means that continuously poking Malphite will still keep his shield from recharging as quickly, but it will feel less frustrating for the Malphite player taking the damage.
#B. Make it so the cooldown can't be increased by taking damage at all, but the cooldown only starts once the shield has been fully broken.
This means that, regardless of what Malphite or anyone else does, it will take a flat 10/8/6 seconds for his shield to recharge no matter what, but it will only recharge once the prior shield has been fully broken. This means it will become a lot more useful once a fight has actually started as well as help against early poke in the laning phase, but it removes the enemies' ability to work around it as well as leads to situations where you enter a fight without the full shield amount to begin with because you couldn't find anyone to break your shield.
#C. Make it so activating Unstoppable Force (Malphite's Ultimate) instantly resets the cooldown on Grapnite Shield.
This is the least imaginative one and also the least useful one, as Unstoppable Force is usually used to initiate a fight, meaning you should already have your Granite Shield up, but, if you feel like you are in a situation where you really just needs an extra shield here and now, you can activate your ultimate to instantly reset it.
#D. Give it an Armor Scaling in addition to it's 10% maximum health scaling.
This change doesn't make it any less bland or awful to use other than it just makes it a little bit more useful, in the way of having a bigger shield.
Anyone else got any ideas as to how we can make Granite Shield feel less bland?
