Ebony Maw barely needs a buff
Before you dogpile me, hear me out. I feel like EM has almost everything he needs to be a great champion. The framework is there, but the only problem is what each effect does (deterioration, black tongue, etc). I really like his falter and power gain buff steal abilities, and his no-contact energy attacks. L3 power steal is solid as well. Where he kinda becomes the meh people talk about is when it comes to damage and reliable utility. So here are his problems and how I would change them.
His L1’s nullify is strangely unreliable: he only seems to nullify on hits if the buff was active on activation. I would just change that to nullify on each hit regardless if a buff existed at the beginning of the special.
L2 doesn’t really have much in the way of anything except as his only respectable-ish damage dealer. In Infinity War, when DS sling ringed the concrete spikes back to EM, they made him bleed, so I think a chunky bleed is a good move, but also, those strike a bunch of places, probably screwing up some tendons, so maybe it inflicts a handful of consumable falter stacks (like KM’s indestructible passives)
Inflicting (indirectly) weakness with deterioration is kind of irrelevant for any decent players who face content that any damage taken is probably fatal. Unless nobody has ever done the math and having 20 deterioration on your +0 fury buff and it reduces the enemies attack to zero, it’s just not a good ability.
Instead, a deterioration passive should give the enemy a 5% chance per stack for medium attacks and unblockable specials to be guaranteed crits (all non-science champs will miss). That would give him similar intercepting power as Ghost and special avoidance as SG. Not broken but still very good.
Black tongue is alright I guess, but 40% AAR for fully ramping is kind of meh. So I would say either let it stack up to twice so we can get 80% AAR, or change the potency to reflect how many missions were complete upon activation (0 missions: 10% AAR; 1 mission: 30% AAR; 2 missions: 50% AAR; All missions: 70% AAR)
So that gives him really good utility. As far as DPS goes, he is still very very meh. How about simply giving him a 1% base attack increase for each miss? That is the ability most stuff revolves around, so why not reward players for making the opponent miss as much as possible?
Did I miss any other lackluster aspects? I feel like the idea is there, but it was either rushed or set aside because they felt like they were already making Cull a big damage champ (so they opted for more utility)
