This Warwick revelation made me change my mind

I read Warwick's design yesterday, and went "oh, that's smart!"

I guaruntee you Warwick's design wasn't lazy, they would have had many other designs they tried out too. This one is doing some subtle, important things:

First, the design is prizing simiplicity for new players, the kind that might come in soon with Arcane Season 2. Second, it wants to be an open-ended buildaround that has high synergy with P&Z cards and encourages you to play with effects that are usually not strong in this mode.

TPoC has different design goals than PvP champions did: those champions were usually created alongisde several new followers to be played in specific highly synergistic pvp archetypes based on their small number of cards. Adapting them to TPoC is awkward because TPoC is all about putitng together cool relic buids and in-run power selection, deckbuilding choices, etc.

Warwick is a simple, thematic design that is all about doing lots of little instances of damage. This can be handled lots of different ways, espescilly in P&Z = which specializes in tiny direct damage spells, skills, and triggered effects. These effects are normally pretty weak in higher end adventures, which is challenging for P&Z champions, because of big enemy health totals and stats.

Warwick makes these normally-weak effects that are present in their region high value for you to draft; turning effects that are usually limited and unimpactful in TPOC into forever-scaling payous due to their star powers; and ties it into Warwick's theme of even small injuries being very dangerous. That's smart design.

If you aren't excited about playing with Warwick, that's fine, but the design is not lazy. It's hitting a lot of important goals all at once - with a simple and accessible design.

Don't worry, I wasn't laid off. I posted a whole departure post about it at the time. I just got an offer to build an exciting new project from the ground up and couldn't resist. I was as surprised to hear about the layoffs as anyone when they happened,

I'm just commenting on the design as a fan of the game :).