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Cassiopeia Rework: Debilitating Toxin

Earthlord Jazz·1/19/2016, 5:08:17 AM·2 votes·792 views

I really appreciated the Cassiopeia discussion with RiotRepertoir, and I was inspired by one of the questions asked which was:

What does "debilitation" mean to you? I see suggestions like this come up from Cass players pretty often, but it's usually not followed by much more than wanting DoTs to be emphasized on the kit, and Twin Fang to be de-emphasized. Do keep in mind I'm not saying this is incorrect. However, I do hope that if we were to do poisons or "debilitation" better, it would manifest in a way that wasn't just stronger DoTs. Unique debuffs? Time delayed afflictions? More CC? Is it simply that you want your Q to be stronger in lane?

So what we Cass players actually desire with our poison? To me, damage was never my end goal with pre-rework Cass. I wanted to poke the enemy down and discourage them from going in on our team, forcing them to back time and time again during sieges in order to secure objectives such as towers or neutral buffs. This is why I've attempted to put more of a 'debilitation' theme into Cass' poison mechanic, focusing more on utility 'diseases' rather than just raw stat buffs or debuffs like we currently have now. Hope this'll give other Cass fans inspiration to keep on keeping on.

Passive-Debilitating Toxin: All poison damage Cass inflicts on enemy champions is turned into purple health (think TahmKench) . After 2-6 seconds of not being in combat, the purple health is replaced with normal damage over 2 seconds (duration is extended if opponent auto-attacks, cast spells, or moves). In addition, champions receive various 'debilitations' depending on how much of their current health is purple. Here are my suggestions:

15% - Attack Speed and Attack Damage is redued by 12.5% 25% - Vision from all sources from your point of view is reduced by 30% 35% - While under the effects of Debilitating Poison, target loses 2% of your current health every second while undergoing movement 45% - All magic damage inflicted on the target is increased by 8% 55% - Vision from all sources except yourself is denied (think nocturne ult)

                * It never made sense to me how somehow poisoning my enemy made myself stronger. It makes much more sense thematically for                 Cass to debilitate the enemy while under he poison. The purple health represents the slow progression and facilitation of a poison/disease. This gives a HUGE REASON to play to coy waiting game with her prey like pre-rework Cass players enjoy. Don't worry though, she'll still have an all-in style if you wish.
  • Basically, your poison abilities will still do damage to the enemy, it will just take more time if left to their own devices, all the while forcing your laning prey to make a choice: Either fight under their debilitations or flee and recuperate their losses with the damage detonation of the purple health. Think of it like the poison is incubating in the body of your enemy. Cassiopeia also has an instant detonation on the purple health via Twin Fang (see E)

Q - Noxious Blast: Cassiopeia blasts an area with a high damaging poison dealing 75/115/155/195/235 (+55% of ability power) plus 8% of the enemies current health over 3 seconds. Hitting a champion with this ability increases her movement speed by 20% for 3 seconds.

  • A small buff to Cassiopeia's poke by giving it some more damage when the enemy is at a higher health, making it slightly easier in the future to stack your debilitations. I kept the base damage and scaling the same even though Cass loses a lot of AP without her Aspect of the Serpent, due to this fact.

W - Miasma: Cassiopeia releases a growing coud of poison that lasts 7 seconds, giving vision to the area. Any enemy that passes through it is poisoned for 2 seconds, dealing 30/40/50/60/70 (+20% ability power) magic damage each second and slowing them by 30%. Continual exposure renews the posion.

  • A large and desperately needed buff to our zoning tool. Much larger base damage and scaling at earlier levels. Nothing really to see here, moving on

E - Twin Fang: _Cassiopeia deals 55 / 80 / 105 / 130 / 155 (+50% of ability power) magic damage to her target. If the target is taking poison damage then Twin Fang's cooldown is reduced on cast. If Twin Fang kills a unit, its mana cost plus 1.5 % of Cassiopeia's total mana is refunded. On hit, the projectile converts all purple health into normal damage (insert cool visual of poison being forcefully expunged). _

  • And here it is, the curtain is dropped away to reveal the final act of Debilitating Poison. I struggled for a long time trying to find a solution to purple health since, on paper, it would be really hard to burst someone when you had to wait 8 seconds before they would take damage. Here's the HUGE nuke you were waiting for. So, you still maintain your gameplay style of going 'ham' on the enemy with Twin Fang if you want to as its damage isn't poison....or you can continually stack up purple health and debilitations and nuke them with one large Twin Fang. Pick your poison!

R - Petrifying Gaze:_ Cassiopeia deals 150 / 250 / 350 (+50% of ability power) magic damage to all enemies in front of her. Enemies facing her are stunned for 2 seconds, while enemies facing away are slowed by 60% for the same duration._

  • No changes here! Great ability, though the cast time can probably be reduced in my biased opinion.

Please give feedback! I'd love to hear more ideas for toxins/debuffs/debilitations!

2 Comments

Quepha1/19/2016, 5:48:30 AM1 votes

A Rioter spoke a while ago about trying to do a system similar to this for DoTs and it sounded like it was very difficult to get it right. For starters you can't use purple since that color is used for magic damage shields like morgana E, so you'd need to pick a different color. Then, health bars start to look cluttered and confusing to players when there gets to be this rainbow of different kinds of health with your poisoned health, barrier, magic only barrier, recently taken damage with Tahm Kench, and then your actual health.

But I think the main reason was that it was hard to accurately calculate damage. % current hp damage, changes in MR/armor, inherent hp regen, defensive steroids that trigger on low health, offensive steroids that trigger on low health, it's basically impossible to correctly estimate all of those factors for the rest of the DoT when it first applies.

I think the way you're describing is more like doing the calculation at once as burst damage but not really dealing damage and instead marking health to be removed over the next few seconds as true damage (kinda like how Zed's ult deals bonus damage at the end of a duration as true damage, but it is calculated from damage he dealt as physical which was affected by armor so it is like armor applies to it). That might be easier to implement but also kind of betrays how DoTs SHOULD work where things can happen in between the application and the end of the duration that change how much damage will be dealt.

Clearly the purpose of this feature would be to allow players to identify when a player is a dead man walking so the attacker knows they can back off as their job is done and the victim needs to decide if they can find a way to gain health quickly to survive or if they want to turn around and try to take someone down with them like a passive-charged Sion. But even base health regen means that a fully 'poisoned' health bar doesn't necessarily mean a character is dead, so you want to give an impression to the poisoner of how much overdamage they have dealt to a player, which is hard to express as you can't have more than all of a player's health colored to show it's poisoned, there's only 100% of the health to work with.