Off the wall idea for Ember rework

[KK680]

Unsure how much traction this could get, but me and my friends on one drunken night of discussing video game mechanics and changes (yes we are that single) thought up of a way to re-balance Ember, who at the moment isn't in the greatest of spots. Of course we needed to buff her while not turning her back into her old days of "Ember walks into a bar. All enemies have been eliminated, proceed to extraction."

The way we wanted to approach her was that rather than penalizing people for using her ult, we wanted to reward people for using her 1, 2 and 3 while making Ember's 4 still a great room clearer. Additionally we wanted to change as little as possible to make this not horrifically difficult/time consuming for DE to put in. The result was that we figured we either needed to change everything or have some kind of system for that. So, what we came up with was a really wierd idea that could potentially work, rework her passive.

 

Ember's ult would no longer have a build up mechanic, instead just having its currently max possible drain, min possible range and damage somewhere in the middle. However the big thing is that her new passive would build up a charge meter (we called it 'Fired up' in our discussion) whenever she used her 1-3 abilities and/or stood near fire (enemies currently on fire). So what's this do? Well, fired up would then give her increased ability range, damage and by far the most important part: Energy regeneration.

This would turn ember from "I need to save all my energy just to use the ult" to "I can spam 1, 2 and 3 all I want and not lose too much energy, but then use 4 when I really need it". That's also why her ult needs to drain as much as I suggested, as soon as that ult would be turned off she'd immediately start to gain energy once more, if her ult drain was small it wouldn't really hurt her energy economy enough. This way people would have to weigh the pros of having her ult for a few seconds vs being able to use her other 3 powers near constantly, and due to the build up mechanic you can't just press ult and wipe out everything in an area as big of a house. You'd need to build it up for it to have proper effective range.

 

Honestly we've no idea how this would work in practice, but it could bring ember into a far better 'ability focused' spot with her ulti only being a thing that you use when nececary or when you have full energy anyway.