Suggested Alistar Rework

Why rework Alistar?

• Awkward gameplay with W-Q combo that relies on a very unintuitive bug to play optimally.

• Heal feels tacked onto kit, a holdover from when the main design idea of Alistar was pushing towers. Heal is too weak to be very useful in lane, but at times has been too good for 5v5s depending on its AP ratio.

• Lategame, Alistar can use his flash-Q or W-Q to engage extremely well. However after that, he contributes almost nothing to the fight. As a player you just wander around punching things, waiting on a move to come off cooldown.

• Nerfs to prevent Alistar from jungling have weaked his support role to the point of near-extinction. His low movespeed does not work well with his playstyle.

What's fun about Alistar?

• AOE knockup

• Breaking CC

• Being unkillable

• Being unmilkable

I seek to retain these properties while making Alistar more interesting to play during a teamfight, without making him a one trick pony in the jungle, and without making him the new terror of top lane. Part of Alistar's identity is that he was imprisoned but broke free. We see this in his visuals as well--he has the remnants of the chains that used to bind him hanging off of him. I want to accentuate the ideas that A) Alistar refuses to be chained up, and B) he is super angry about it, too.

Passive: Stampede: When Alistar is attacked, he gains rage. Alistar generates 5 rage each time he takes damage, no more than 10 rage per second. Half rage from minions and monsters. Alistar gains 2 movespeed for each point of rage he has. At 30 rage, Alistar ignores unit collision. At 70 rage, Alistar begins stampeding and deals 4+16xlevel damage per second to all nearby enemies. When out of combat for 3 seconds, Alistar loses 15 rage every second.

Q: Mess With the Bull...: Alistar enrages for 3 seconds, ignoring the cap on rage generation while active. After the 3 second period is over, he slams the ground, slowing all enemies around him for 20/30/40/50/60% for 3 seconds and damaging them equal to 55/65/75/85/100% of the amount of damage he took during the 3 seconds. Cooldown: 11/10/9/8/7s. (note: this could potentially be a LOT of damage if the enemy hits him enough)

W: You Can't Milk Those: Alistar expends all rage(minimum: 50) to gain a shield that blocks damage equal to 240% of the expended rage (+40% armor) (+40% MR). While the shield holds, Alistar retains the bonuses from his passive. Shield lasts 3 seconds. Cooldown: 15/14/13/12/11.

E: Nothing Can Hold Me Back: Alistar roars, breaking all CC on himself. Breaking a root or a hard CC grants Alistar 20/40/60/80/100 rage. Breaking a slow grants half. 15s cooldown. |

R: You Get the Horns!: Alistar charges forward, goring every champion he meets along the way and then tossing them backwards half the distance they were carried, dealing 200/300/400 damage (+100% rage). Alistar charges farther the more rage he has. Press again to cancel the charge. Alistar will stop early and deal 20% extra damage if he hits a tower, inhibitor, base wall, nexus, or large jungle wall. 120/110/100s cooldown. 700 base range +20/60/100 range per 10 rage.

Okay. So I've given Alistar some pretty insane chasing power. However, he has almost no way to actually deal damage unless the enemy attacks him. I can't stress this enough, because it is the core idea behind this moveset. The enemy is absolutely going to have to play around the fact they really need to be careful about randomly damaging Alistar while his Q is up. I like when champions fundamentally change the way you play the game.

So his play pattern will be something like, get the entire incoming wave of enemy creeps on him, Q, and run at the enemy, hopefully building up a full rage bar along the way. Then his Q will pop, damaging and slowing the enemies, and he can use his shield to get out, or continue the chase. If he's 6, he can try to run or flash ahead of the enemy and R them backwards (also saving himself), or if they're somewhat out of range, he can R forwards. Late game, he wants to get hit by enemy skillshots, not just to block for his friends but to hopefully soak some CC to get a full bar of rage from his E to engage on the enemy.

So to go into detail with each ability:

Passive: It's Rage, not Fury, because fury champs all get fury from attacking, and Ali gets it from being attacked. Also Alistar's fury decays incredibly fast. I want to avoid instanced where Alistar gets to hoard his rage and wait for just the exact time--I want Alistar to have to make a snap decision, and I want his enemies to have a chance to play around his rage--to have the opportunity to not give him the tools to engage on him.

Q: His main damage tool. Low cooldown ability for him to use to turn all the incidental damage of a teamfight back onto the entire enemy team. It's going to force the enemy team to think about what they're doing. The thing is, though, if they do think about it, they can completely play around it and leave Alistar with very little to do. I suppose Ali now hoses champs that do indiscriminate AOE dmg like Sejuani, Amumu, Malzahar, etc. But that's just the way the cookie crumbles. I like the idea of kind of playing chicken with the enemy team, daring them to attack you and commit to killing you only to turn the tables on them, shield yourself, and then wipe them out with a huge Q.

W: I wanted to make sure Alistar can actually survive wading into the middle of the enemy team and still get out alive. He has to actually be in the mix for this to be useful, though, so he can't use it for infinite sustain in top lane, however. Yeah, a shield that scales with armor/MR sounds broken as fuck but whatever.

E. The CC breaker. This is the thing that lets Alistar snap initiate on an entire team during a siege. All those Morgana Qs and Nami Qs and Janna Qs that people like to throw out for no reason turn into wombo combos for your team. Also big engaging ultimates like Ashe Arrow, Leona Solar Beam, Thresh hooks, Sejuani ult, etc... Alistar turns those engages around super quick. I like this and his Q because it absolutely will force people to play around what Alistar brings to the table. I think that's good design when you have to treat each champion differently and they aren't all just slight variations on each other.

R. Holy shit that's some long range. I know. It's actually only slightly less range than his w-q currently unless he has Rage. And keep in mind Alistar throws his enemies back half the distance he carried them, so if he catches them only at the very end of his charge, he won't throw them very far. So let's say he gets a perfect, full rage engage and carries the enemy team the entire 1700 range. He's going to toss them backwards half that distance. He is now very, very far away from his team. Hopefully his team was following him in and are ready to commence the wombo on the poor victims. But if he goes too far or his team doesn't have his back, he could find himself extremely vulnerable. So it's time to put on the Q and instakill their whole team if they mess with the bull. They're just going to have to discipline themselves. Alternatively, if Alistar comes from behind or runs/flashes ahead of the enemy, they're about to take a long, unpleasant ride. His ganks out of the fog of war with this thing wouldn't be a big deal since he won't have any rage in that situation.

TL;DR: Don't attack Alistar unless you wanna get fucked up.