New Hero - Mantis

Mantis!

Art Design:
This hero could be designed to look like a praying mantis or some other creature with praying mantis features and dual blades.

Hero description:
Mantis is a melee agility carry that uses physical abilities rather that auto attacks as a main source of damage. The hook to this hero is that each subsequent ability used becomes stronger with combo points.

Stats:

Strength - 17 (+1.7)
Agility - 30 (+3.0)
Intelligence - 18 (+1.8)

Base Health - 473
Base Mana - 234
Base Armor - 4.29 from Agility
Movement Speed - 310
Turn Rate - 0.5
Sight Range - 1800/800
Attack Range - melee
Missile Speed - instant
Attack Duration - 0.3+0.3
Cast Duration - 0.3+0.3
Base Attack Time - 1.3
Base Damage - 30-33

Abilities:
Dash and Slice: Ability Target unit - Affects units - Physical damage
Mantis dashes toward the target at high speeds inflicting damage upon contact. Adds 1 combo point to mantis and resets to 0 upon reaching 4 combo points or after a duration of 5.
Range: 600+(100* number of combo points)
Damage: 50
Cooldown: 8/7/6/5
Mana cost: 50/40/30/20

Nimble Strike: Ability Target unit - Affects units - Physical damage
Mantis quickly strikes while blocking damage from any source of attacks up to a certain amount. Adds 1 combo point to mantis and resets to 0 upon reaching 4 combo points or after a duration of 4.
Range: 300
Damage: 50
Damage block: 50+(50* number of combo points)
Block duration: 2
Cooldown: 8/7/6/5
Mana cost: 50/40/30/20

Shocking Stab: Ability Target enemy - Affects enemy - Physical damage
Mantis stabs his foe with disabling force stunning him for a short time. Adds 1 combo point to mantis and resets to 0 upon reaching 4 combo points or after a duration of 5.
Range: 300
Damage: 50
Stun duration: 0.5+(0.5* number of combo points)
Cooldown: 8/7/6/5
Mana cost: 50/40/30/20

Sweet Slash: Ability Target enemy - Affects enemy - Physical damage
Mantis Slashes his enemy with both blades causing massive damage. Adds 1 combo point to mantis and resets to 0 upon reaching 4 combo points or after a duration of 5.
Range: 300
Damage: 50+(agility* number of combo points)
Cooldown: 30/20/10
Mana cost: 100/150/200

I thought of this hero because I want a hard carry that doesn't just sit there and auto attack. I'm sure this hero would need some tweaks to balance him better, but this is a starting point and I really feel something like this could work and still be awesome.

Hmm... The way he uses his skills are quite unique. The key is using a skill, then attacking once or twice, and then using another skill and so on. I'll tell you if he's balanced after I analyze it further.

Its a really good concept for your first hero idea. Reminds me of my first hero idea, Na'Azul, The Scavenger :)


EDIT:
Now there's just 1 glaring problem I see in this hero so far. It's his lack of damage without his ultimate. All his skills only do 50 damage without his ultimate. You may argue that they have low cooldowns, but at the point when you are able to spam your skills consistently, 50 damage is way too low. Make the damage scaling for those skills something like 75/100/125/150. It would greatly increase his effectiveness in skirmishes.
For Nimble Slash, I have a suggestion. Instead of a damage block, there could be a 70% evasion chance for a second or 2. The combo points can then go into increasing the damage of the skill by, for example, 75/100/125/150(*half of combo points).
I would not call him a hard carry, as his only carry skill is Sweet Slash. However, he would be a devastating offlaner and ganker that can snowball the game into a "sweet" one.

Well, I guess my thought was that by level 16 your auto attacks would deal more damage and so like you said you would want to attack in between casting. So assuming you get agility items which are encouraged by the ultimate then your auto attacks would be more useful for damage out put at that point, and the abilities would become more utility other than the ult. So I think it would be balanced, but I think if I wanted the abilities to do more damage then I would have to lower the auto attack damage then some how.

In that case I could do something like this: q, w, & e would deal 1.25/1.5/1.75/2 * agility, that would make each ability do more damage than your auto attack if you have mostly agility items. If that's too low or too high of damage then just increase or decrease the multiplier to the agility. Now if I did this I feel that along with auto attacks you would just be dishing out too much damage. So maybe with each combo point it reduces your attack damage by 20% maybe.

I like the idea of being a "hard carry that doesn't auto attack as much as use abilities". Also I like the damage block better because it's more reliable, and I hate having to rely on chance even if odds are in my favor. Thanks for the input though that helps a lot!

The thing is, he would still do a lot less attack damage at that stage of the game, because his intelligence gain is ****, and many heroes would also have more health by then. He won't be reliant on auto attacks unless he somehow gets a Divine Rapier or something :P

I have an idea for the scaling of his skills. For each combo point, each skill (that is not his ultimate) deals 20% of his agility. So with 5 combo points, it would finally deal the full agility in damage. This could amount to hundreds of damage with a couple of combos, which fits with his carry-ish nature. His ultimate will still do tons of damage, since the scaling is agility*combo points. However, I still think the damage of his abilities should scale like 50/75/100/125. It doesn't have to be the exact numbers, but all I'm saying is that 50 damage isn't a big deal at any stage of the game, really.

Thanks for listening to my feedback :)

nice idea - for more team based fighting change 3 things. (I hope this would create better balance, but like weaver he's squishy, and like trax, will have no inate escape skill)
1. I really like the idea of having counters. make 1 skill, that creates counters, while doing something else.. (like your blink strike first skill) increase counters to 10 at level 4. 1/1/2/2 per level of skill used (ie at level 4, you will get 2 counters added, everytime you skill) it doesn't reset after 10. quick cd (like <5 seconds) possibly make this passive aswell, with counters increasing over time. 1 counter every 3 seconds. Max inc per level - 4/6/8/10 (takes 30 seconds to go full) or max 10 counters at level 1, and just decrease the counter up rate. ie level 1-4 1 counter 6 seconds / 4 / 3 / 2 (so takes 20 seconds to max..)
2. create a skills that removes all counters, but provides high damage, a buff, heal (whatever you think) ie 25 dmg* number of counters. and reduces armor by -1 per counter. set's counters to 0 - decent cd (10 secs) debuff last 20 secs. physical dmg (so 250 dmg, and minus armor, ouchie..) (can possible also blink strike the target, making it worth while to sacrifice your counters)
3. create a passive which benefits from the counters. such as greater dmg and attack speed (like the old huskar) or something like that. could be attack speed and evasion? + 3/6/9/12 per level attack speed per counter, + 2%/4%/6%/8% evasion?

ulti can be something to utilize the counters - like giving + 10/15/20 counters for 10 seconds, that cannot be removed throughout the duration (you will notice it will give him 100% evasion for his ulti after level 2) CD can be 60 seconds or something like that..

what do you think? same idea as your hero - but with a better long term impact.

Yea thanks again for the input! This is supposed to be an agility carry so Int gain is pointless. I think you may be forgetting about the base attack speed, sure his base attack damage is low but he starts with base 1 attack speed. Also his agility gain is high so if we compare him to another carry like Phantom Lancer(PL), then you will find PL(lvl 16) with 88 agility and Mantis(lvl 16) with 80. Mantis with 80 total attack damage and PL with 120 total attack damage. Since Mantis would have better attack speed his DPS would be 108 and PL DPS would be 133. So not including PL illusions they would have pretty close DPS (btw Anti Mage would also have 108 DPS at lvl 16).

Now lets say PL has 8 illusions and his nuke every 7 seconds that would give him a total of 379 DPS. So with my original Mantis the max DPS would be 167 with the use of all abilities. Keep in mind that Mantis would have more initial burst(about 440) though and PL is really strong with 8 illusions (even without the diffusal). So if I use the changes to his first 3 abilities that I made( damage = 1.25/1.5/1.75/2 * agility) then his DPS would increase to 233 with an initial burst of 770. So we are getting closer now to the mighty PL (btw PL with 4 illusions would have 238 DPS). If I use your suggestion (125 + 20% agility per combo) that would get Mantis theoretically to about 252 DPS without the ult.

So I like your suggestion but the one thing I am worried about, is that increased DPS along with the utility that his attacks offer might make him too strong since you could stun dash and damage block every 5 seconds. Your right though I definitely have to increase the damage of his abilities. I don't think he should have the most DPS in the game but I would rather have a good balance of damage and utility. Thanks again!

Thats interesting but I kind of like the single target potential rather then better team fight. Also I wouldn't want passives because I want him to use combos, so when you choose the order of skills you could use "e" last for longer stun or "w" last for more block or "q" for a long range blink. I just feel if you throw too many counters in there it would become to complicated to keep track of. That's an interesting idea though and you could probably make a another hero from that.

Oh! He's an Agility carry! I thought his primary stat was Intelligence thanks to that * next to Intelligence. Put it next to Agility instead. :P

Hmm... His burst damage is indeed quite high. Then the base damage on all his abilities can be reduced to 50/60/70/80 or something. Since his abilities' damage scale by Agility, his skills will be more for utility in the early game, while late game it would be devastating to play against. The damage block is also extremely high now that I think about it. It's literally 300 damage block with 5 combo points! Maybe that is intended, but its really strong for a 5 second cooldown skill, even if it is a short 2 second duration. Maybe a 20 damage block per combo would be better. Blocks a lot of damage early game when he most needs it, and not being overpowered late game.

Sorry, I have absolutely no idea why the "*" was by the int that's a big mistake lol. Thanks for pointing that out. Anyways keep in mind that the scaling would come from cool down and mana cost. it wouldn't be too strong i don't think at low levels because it would be on an 8 sec cool down and cost 50 mana while he starts with about 220 mana pool. Also my intention was to only allow a max of 4 combo points. I would rather not re-work his abilities, instead just tweak them a bit since I feel he is close to what I would want. I feel if I increase his damage I would have to decrease his utility, but I'm not sure. Thanks again that's a huge help.

You are very close to making a really good hero. Just a little damage buff will do. You won't have to decrease his utility, because he doesn't rely on auto attacks anyway, and it will help him to hold his own in prolonged combat.

I enjoy discussing with you :)