Opinions on Dark Star Orianna's strengths and weaknesses?

Over the course of Dark Star Orianna's teasers and pre-assembled material, I certainly felt significant hype towards the subject matter of getting a new skin for my newfound favorite champion Orianna. While she has gotten skins that are pretty good, I never found one that clicked perfectly for a type of skin I'd like to always play on her, currently I bounce between Bladecraft Orianna and Sewn Chaos Orianna (it's not that amazing, but I'd personally think chroma pack might make it pretty amazing).

Winter Wonder Orianna is pretty good all around and Heartseeker Orianna is okay-ish with how the animations are generally pretty nice, although Heartseeker Orianna both strays from the ADC genre and her sort of strange auto attack animation and visual appearance do make her relatively lackluster. Although visuals are pretty subjective so I wouldn't hold that against the skin. TPA Orianna's main selling point probably would be T-shirt, TPA, and/or ponytail type skin overall. Not really something I'd like to pick up personally.

In comes Dark Star Orianna, a new skin for Orianna for 2017 revolving around the popular Dark Star theme that lit up (or darkened up) the rift with Thresh and Varus in the previous year. Both designs were fairly well done, and I had high hopes for the duo introduced this year. That said most expectations were met for Dark Star Kha'Zix with his stellar entrance and design. The geometric and sharp forms with vivid lights suit him well, and the animations chosen for his recall was absolutely great to watch in the previews I have seen for him. Overall I have little qualms with Dark Star Kha'Zix's execution as a design. Then there's Dark Star Orianna.

Dark Star Orianna's strengths are in her animations during combat and falling out of combat. Her Ball looks stupendous with the axles and coloration chosen with that gold on dark, and her basic attacks are clean and beautiful to watch flying towards the enemy making a beautiful collision animation on contact. Almost makes me want to use her passive basic attacks exclusively at times.

(Q) Command: Attack has been granted a visual change in which the ball changes into a bright coloration of a yellowish tone resembling that of a comet or shooting star of sorts while in motion. While this gives enemies more visual guidance towards the actions of the ball, it's nothing impairing to either parties. (W) Command: Dissonance has had its area of effect changed visually into The Ball creating a sweep of blue and purple hues in a smooth coloration while a neat, clear blue and white indicator swirls around to show the zone clearly and fading away to show the spell's duration.

(E) Command: Protect creates a smooth animation back to Orianna with a whitish blue comet-like coloration instead. Creating a sort of abstract spacial shield around Orianna with a nice hard edged purple blue colors, it's pleasant to the eye and fits well into the theme without any overbearing modifications to the shield (like how I feel about the poro shield of winter wonder orianna, though again that's subjective)

(R) Command: Shockwave, this animation was more likely made to be the centerpiece of this skin, which makes sense of course. The Ball plays into the darkstar theme and forcefully drags celestial objects AND enemies into itself as it abruptly transforms into a black hole for a brief moment. The clean animation and symmetrical design of the starlights were well chosen and well placed, with the shockwave after looking stellar. I won't comment too much on the color since apparently its gone under some changes a few times, but in retrospect the battle animations are what makes Dark Star Orianna strong.

Then comes the less notable and less used features of Dark Star Orianna's features. Dark Star Orianna's death animation, which brings me to the rig chosen for this particular skin. As opposed to traditional Orianna design, Darkstar seems to have chosen a body rig in which her body does not come apart. This is notable because very little skins do this, the only existing skin that has a rig SIMILAR is Sewn Chaos Orianna. However it is revealed upon death that Seen Chaos Orianna will fall apart like all other Orianna skins, and it makes me wonder why Dark Star Orianna does not fall apart. When Dark Star Orianna dies, her ball loses its celestial aspects, and she simply flops over. Not even falls, just falls backwards with her legs tucking to the side awkwardly and her arms flopping however it goes. Her eyes are still glowing and her head postured to feel like she may very well be still alive. While I understand one probably shouldn't care too much to die very much on their newly bought skin, I felt there was little care into this one for a 1350 RP skin. Don't get me wrong, the animations and concept and sound are great, I just wish there was more polish overall. I understand that Dark Star Varus and Kha'Zix also die while physically remaining intact, I felt there probably should've been a bit more special treatment towards Dark Star Orianna as much as there was for Dark Star Thresh and his animation of being sucked into the very black hole he carried. In retrospect I would've highly still preferred Orianna's basic death animation over the current one, it feels so lackluster. Alternatively it probably wouldn't have been too theme-breaking for Orianna to have a black hole at her Ball or skirt to perform a similar death animation, or even dissolve into celestial dusts. But keeping her rig stuck together in death feels very off, and from what I can understand I believe part of it comes from the desire to pull Dark Star Orianna from being standard Orianna... Which brings me to the next point.

Overall the sounds of skin has been stupendous, perfect and each ability has its own amazing sfx. Except her passive. Yes, while all sound effects have been altered for Dark Star Orianna, when Orianna walks over her ball it will still make the mechanical clicking noise as it always does. Now arguably that might be for clarity sake, or maybe it simply wasn't important to cover that part. Yet it is still immersion breaking, at least for me. Having all these amazing space-theme sounds for each effect and suddenly getting the mechanical snapping noise when The Ball reconnects with you, it feels kind of like the sfx are unfinished. This is a small thing, and yet it's because it's so small I think it should be fixed.

Finally, which is strange because this is almost the reason you'd get the skin, Dark Star Orianna's model. Overall it's good, it's special and extremely different and definitely isn't just a paint on. It's not a robot anymore, and that said that is sort of what makes it kind of a strange feat to me. Dark Star Orianna seems to have been intended to be designed as a strange celestial or cosmic creature of the dark, one who decides things like in her recall where she picks a planet to end. And yet, she has these awkward robotic traits still. Now I'm not asking for these traits to be fixed or for Orianna to be updated to having the most epic skin of the century (although it'd be hella cool), I'm asking for the understanding that Dark Star Orianna's models mixed in with her animations not skin-deep finally designed are flawed in ways. In her recall she moves smoothly as intended, she is no longer a robot but an entity that has work in space. Yet all her animations even when idle will still remain robotic and weird in that way. Orianna was always designed to be a strange robot, and that reflects in her new skin. Now generally that's not a bad thing, but in this case it does break away from the regular experience. With Dark Star Thresh he's always this creepy asshole entity that wants to cause pain and distress, and it makes sense. With Orianna, it doesn't feel quite right for this entity to move erratically when she's been clearly shown to be quite elegant and smooth in motions when selecting planets in her recall. It is almost as if the is showcasing a desire to fulfill something, but not taking the full steps to complete this desire

Which brings me to my final (final) point, Dark Star Orianna's physical model. My opinion is subjective so forgive me if our thoughts fail to align. Remember when I mentioned that the geometric forms compliment Dark Star Kha'Zix? That doesn't hold true for Dark Star Orianna, or her legs. For some reason Dark Star Orianna has odd angular design at her legs, and it is not really fitting for what they intend for her to look, part of me feels like that's kind of why her splashart includes only her top half. That aside, the other qualm I have is her head, but really that's ACTUALLY more subjective than feeling outright lazy like the legs. I've noticed a lot of people agree her legs are awkward, and I feel like it could be an easy fix. Just smoothen it out and put some of that metal or glow onto them, she's clearly not that afraid of using metal and it wouldn't make her robotic. The glow might be exclusive to her top half, but not doing a thing for those legs feel like it's doing a great disservice to the skin. There could be some fixes to the skin to really be worthy of the 1350 RP value, but for now we just have to see if the studios are willing to pick up these issues or will just let it stay as is. After all none of these issues are all that gameplay negligent, rather just immersion breaking.

TL;DR All opinions I have on Dark Star Orianna is subjective, but I'd like to hear what you feel about the skin!

I'll just make a small list of what could use a few tunings to this skin.

• New sound effect for when Dark Star Orianna reclaims The Ball
• Revising Dark Star Orianna's death animation, be it reverting it to classic Orianna or recreating a spacial themed death
• Touch up on Dark Star Orianna's non-combat animations
• Redesign Dark Star Orianna's legs

Overall the skin is amazing, but Im personally feeling like I might just wait for a lootbox to drop it if it lasts past the Dark Star event. Hope you guys found this interesting, as said above, let me know what you feel is positive and negative about this new skin!