Time To Design My Own Champion! Kirito, the Blades of Justice!

Hello everyone!

In this post, I would like to propose a full design for my own champion. This will include the champions theme, intended role, kit, and explanations of why the kit is thematically sound and balancable. I will not include numeric values, as those would need to be balanced through actually making and playing the character with a lot of testers.

There is one archetype that I really really love in games, that I feel League of Legends is missing. This is the dual wielding swordsman. The closest thing we have to this right now is Olaf, but he is not quite what I am looking for. What I want is someone much more offensively natured than olaf, who is often played as a tank.

To help with coming up with the design for this kit, I have looked to different sources for inspiration. One inspiration in particular is Kirito from Sword Art Online, an anime that I really love.
*spoliers*
Kirito ends up being able to dual wield in the show, and fights as kind of a berserker force of offensive power that swings faster and faster and harder until he destroys his enemies. This is the kind of character I want to go for (again, more offensive than Olaf, and trust me his kit will be entirely different).
*end of spoilers*

So, my champions theme will be a dual wielding swords. He will be a male. His personality will be a young cocky but heroic warrior. While his cockyness can sometimes get him into trouble, his strength and heroic traits usually pull him out of the situation before too many people die, heh. This character also needs a name, and since I am not the most creative person when it comes to names, I am going to be lame and just call him Kirito for now.

The intended role of Kirito is Fighter. Not melee carry, not tanky dps. A fighter. Think kind of how you would always want to play wukong, even though it is usually sadly better to build pretty tanky. That is the kind of role I want to fill. Not a glass cannon melee carry like master yi by any means, but someone who is squishier than a garren or darius or irelia.

Alright, so now let us move on to Kirito's kit!

I will start with his ultimate, as it is kind of his defining feature!

Ultimate: Blades of Fury: 
Passive: Kirito pulls out his second sword. Kirito now has two auto attacks that he can use. Each sword has the same attack speed, and the second sword will always swing halfway through the attack speed cooldown time later after the first auto attack (at the earliest).

Active: Kirito starts to go Berserk. He instantly gains y attack speed, and gains z additional attack speed over time. Additionally, his auto attacks do not cause him to slow down for the animation to go off.

So as you might can tell, this is VERY ripped from Kirito from the anime. He later in the game gains a second sword, and can gain the ability to swing faster and faster over time. I also added in the bit about auto attack animations not slowing him down to allow him to not suffer as bad as some other melee fighters do as far as actually landing his auto attacks.

Also to explain more on the passive. Let's say you are auto attacking a target 5 times. Let's say you have 1.0 attack speed, meaning you land an attack with each sword every 1 second. What will happen is at 0 seconds after attacking, the first sword will hit. At .5 seconds the second will hit. At 1 second the first will hit again. At 1.5 seconds the second will hit again, and etc. Keep in mind that the second attack is weaker!

Now on to his other abilities!

Passive: Burst of Power: 
When all of Kirito's abilities are on cooldown (he must have spent points in at least 3) he gains a damage buff to his next auto attack, dealing x% missing health damage to the attacks target. Gaining this buff has a Y second cooldown.

Pretty straightforward. Not usable until level three, and has a cooldown to not be abusable. Cooldown may decrease with level, and damage will probably increase with level slightly. To be clear on how to use it, at level 3-5, if your Q, W and E are all on cooldown, it becomes active and the cooldown activates once the attack is used. After you hit level 6 and rank up your ultimate, it must also be on cooldown for your to gain this bonus.


Q: Diving Strike: 
Active: Kirito launches forward to target location. While he is traveling, he parries all incoming auto attacks. Upon reaching his target location, he strikes the area with his sword, dealing it's auto attack damage as physical damage + x bonus AD. If Kirito has leveled up his ultimate, he will deal one extra off hand auto attacks worth of damage when landing this ability, and he also takes 25% less magic damage while he is charging.

Again, pretty straight foward. This is Kirito's gap closer, which allows him to jump onto and stick to enemy targets, while his ultimate is designed to help him stay on targets.

W: Will of a Warrior:
Passive: Kirito passively gains additional health regen. The higher his health is, the higher this bonus. The lower his health is, the lower this bonus is, down to 0 at 10% health. This bonus starts to decrease when Kirito's health is above X (probably around 2500-3000).

Active: Kirito gains additional movement speed for a duration. While this ability is on cooldown, Kirito loses the passive effect.

Now while the active is pretty straightforward for combatting the all mighty weakness of being kited that fighters have, the passive may seem confusing to you and possible OP at first. After all, how OP is it when this guy can sit here and regen through my poke?! Well, that is kind of the point. One of the weaknesses of fighters is that they are sqishy in nature, and being poked down just kind of hurts them more than it would their tanky dps counterparts. The decrease in value is to make sure that this passive is not abused if you decide to build Kirito tanky, as he is not meant to be a tanky dps, he is a fighter.

Also note that if you do manage to poke kirito down enough, he will lose a lot of this health regen, making him vulnerable. This is where the counterplay lies, though I may need to tweak how steep the dropoff is and where it cuts off completely in order to balance the ability.

This passive is further balanced by the fact that Kirito has a really weak early game, so even with this regen, a strong early game opponent like udyr, renekton, or riven should destroy him assuming equal skill. On the other hand, Kirito will do really well against weaker early game champions.

E: Strengthend Blow: 
Passive: Kirito stores up charges over time. This time is unaffected by cooldown reduction. You can store up to two charges at a time. A new charge will not start charging unless you have 0 or 1 stored charges. If you have a charge, you may cast this ability.

Active: Kirito's next auto attack will deal x (+y% bonus AD) bonus damage and knock back the enemy champion a short distance. Kirito will follow through with this knockback, moving the same distance himself.


Fairly straightforward. Allows Kirito to have some additional damage, scaling, and CC to help round out his kit. The ammo system exists to allow kirito to save up damage over time. Charges will probably store a little slower than Vi's E's charges, and there will be a longer cooldown between uses than with her E's.

Thematically Sound:

Alright, so thematically everything but maybe w automatically should make sense for a dual wielding swordsman fighter. The W passive is probably stretching it a bit, but being able to dash or run faster for a bit makes sense. At the very least though, the w passive does make sense in relation to basing it off of Kirito, since in one episode he has rediculous health regen gear on.

Balanceability:

Now to show why the kit is balanceable. To show this, I first will explain the current problems with the fighter class in League of Legends, how this kit avoids those problems, and where counterplay exists.

Fighter Class weaknesses:

1: Being kited. One of the biggest problems for all fighters is being kited. Kirito is able to stop this via his w movement speed steroid, and his ult active making him not lose movement speed for auto attack animations.

2: Reliance on auto attacks. Relying on auto attacks as a melee champion has proved to be a difficult hurdle for many champions to deal with. Mainly for reason such as being kited, and not being able to burst a champion down like an assassin. While Kirito will not likely burst a champion down like an assassin, he will still deal high damage over time, and has the mobility to deal it more reliably than someone like udyr, or even wukong.

3: Squishiness: Many fighters are squishy. While not as squishy as someone like Fiora, Kirito is still squishy. However, to get around this players must adopt a new playstyle. You cannot just dive in with him like you do on a bruiser. To play him optimally, you must wait for a good oppotunity to single out a target, and dive in and go. You are not by any means a frontline tank. You are more of a mid line champion, sort of a second wall of damage in between your teams tank and adc, and you must play safely, while dealing damage. This will likely cause Kirito to have a high skill cap, which is something I am fine with, as high skill cap champions can be the most fun.

Counterplay: 
There are a few counterplay options for Kirito. First of all, his Q being a skill shot makes it dodgeable. You should also likely not attack him while he is charging, though you are a free to cc him.

Secondly, if you burst down large portions of k=Kirito's health (with a champ like Udyr) then you will be countering his w passive, which is a large part of his early game.

Lastly, to be successful in team fights, Kirito will probably have to have his ultimate on. If you can cc him during this ultimate, then he will be useless later on. You do not even have to finish bursting him, just cc him and deal with him later. Or you could burst him if you want, though if he puts himself in a burstable position, he is playing wrong.

Until Next Time!
"The main reason I got stronger was so I’d be able to survive."
-Rikukun

Edit: Forgot to mention one really important detail! Kirito will use mana as a resource, though I believe I will keep his mana costs relatively low, something probably similar to wukong.