Building a Champion Concept: Snake Charmer

This champion concept has undergone a number of different iterations over the course of a few months. The idea started off as a scrapped concept for a poison assassin that I made a few months ago. The character was very powerful at bursting her targets down.

The Original Kit, and Why it was Scrapped:

The original kit was based around my love of Twitch, and how satisfying it is for my passive to get me kills a few seconds after I disengaged or cs after a misclick. The passive was exactly that:

Passive: When your poisons expire on an enemy, all poisons expire at once, and the target takes magic damage based on the number of poisons that expired.

Q: Store up to 4 poisoned daggers. Active to throw a dagger in a line, dealing damage and applying a stack of poison that magic deals damage over 2 seconds. (Originally the Q applied multiple stacks of the poison, up to 4, and each would increase the passive's damage, but this was later removed to have it only refresh)

W: Your next basic attack is empowered, dealing bonus magic damage and applying a poison that slowed the target for 4 seconds. After 2 seconds, reactivate to get another empowered attack and turn the slow into a stun for the next second and simultaneously refresh the 4 second slow duration. (1 stack for passive)

E: Dash in a line, dealing damage and applying a stack of poison to all enemies hit for 8 seconds. (1 stack for passive)

R: Infect target enemy with 3 stacks of poison that deals true damage over 6 seconds. If this poison is the one that expires to proc the passive, it the passive deals double damage.

This kit looks alright, right? Well, where it all goes wrong is when you introduce the math into the passive. Because I never got past doing the math for the passive.

The original kit had the Q and W giving 4 and 2 stacks, respectively, E 1, and R gave 3. If you pulled this kit off perfectly, the passive could deal 20x damage. The weakest iteration of the kit, 10 base +10% AP scaling, had the passive dealing 1200 damage alone, and that might be balanced if the rest of the abilities were weak, but it was just too powerful in my opinion (math is calculated with 500 AP). The original kit had a 50% ratio and the ability would get up to 200 base at level 18, meaning it could deal 9,000 damage. This was, again, if you pulled it off perfectly, but it was actually not that skill reliant. 500 AP isn't tough to get to with an AP champion, and with these same numbers, if you only got a 4x (Q expired first), the LOWEST damage this kit could deal just mashing the buttons with no skill, would still have the passive dealing 1,800 damage. It was clear that this kit was too strong, without a doubt, so I had to completely kill this champion.

Fast forward a few months, I brought this champion concept back out, looking for a way to make this poison character work, and this led me to getting the idea of snake charming. Originally, my first idea was a mage from Shurima who controls snakes. Then I started researching snake charming, and found India. The character will be an Ionian woman who hides a snake that she controls in her dress. And, as I continued researching, I found that snake charmers are revered as healers due to their close association with the god, Shiva. Shiva is a blue-skinned god who wears a snake around his neck. He is tasked with destroying the world so that it can be reborn, and he can also cure things like snake venom. This leads me to a character who worships a Shiva-inspired Ionian god and invokes his powers as a support to heal, buff, and most importantly, cleanse crowd control from her allies. She also keeps a snake in her dress, who attacks when she uses her abilities to attack opponents. Shiva is also the lord of the dance, and so her basic attacks will be animated to look like snake movements, and I'm considering having her ultimate be inspired by the dance that Shiva uses to destroy and recreate the world, potentially putting a relatively small heal on allies in an area and making them CC immune while also damaging enemies. Perhaps animating an ethereal cobra dancing alongside her, and perhaps having this same cobra descend from the sky on allies when they are healed by the ability, turning a different color briefly when it blocks a CC ability. I haven't fully finished her kit, yet, nor do I have a name for her (I'll research Hindu names later), I just wanted to share my ideas for the character and how the plans have changed over the journey of designing her thus far.

For basic lore, she comes from the same tribe of Ionians as Karma. That's about all I got so far.