u/BeNeVeu

TLDR: Separate the wind wall part and the damaging slash from her W allowing her to have more control over the spell

THE PROBLEM:

Among projectile-blocking abilities (Yasuo Braum Mel), Blade Whirl is unique in the fact that it has another use which is stacking Samira's style meter. This forces Samira to make a difficult choice regarding her most important ability, both decisions having a positive and a negative effect:

-use W to block an enemy projectile, leaving Samira without an ability to use for stacking her style meter -use W to stack style meter, neglecting the projectile-blocking part

There is a third scenario which is actually how Samira's gameplay often goes:

-use W to both block projectiles and stack style

However this also comes with a downside: to stack her style meter with W, the enemy must be in the 325 radius of the ability which is a bit short of melee range. Basically when you use W for both purposes, you are already fully comitted to the fight.

Once Samira uses W, she needs to engage to get the benefit of stacking her passive, especially when chaining with E (W can give 2 style points). This means you are limited in choosing what ability to block, as you are most of the times forced to negate the first ability thrown at you. From a defensive power that can have huge impact, the ability becomes something that you press before going in to take a little less damage.

The problem becomes worse when you fight multiple enemies and hardly playable when you play against good players that won't randomly throw stuff at you knowing you have W.

THE SOLUTION:

My suggestion is to separate the functionalities W has into 2 different casts. This is how her W currently works (from the wiki):

Samira spins her blade over 0.75 seconds, destroying all hostile non-turret projectiles within the area for the duration. Samira slashes twice during Blade Whirl, each one dealing physical damage to all nearby enemies. The first slash occurs immediately and the second one occurs after the duration.

My initial idea was to make W a two-part ability with a recast, similar to Lee Sin W. The first cast would be the slash doing damage, and the second would be the blocking part. Ultimately this wouldn't fix her problem since she would still be forced to use her block during the recast timer, and the goal is to make the block independent from the style meter stacking.

But then I remembered: Samira's R is a useless ability if she doesn't have style. This is the ability slot where the damaging part of her W can go to. It would look like this:

W: Samira spins her blade over 0.75 seconds, destroying all hostile non-turret projectiles within the area for the duration.

R: Samira slashes, dealing physical damage to all nearby enemies. This ability becomes Inferno Trigger (her ultimate) when style rank is S

The slash's cd, damage can be kept the same, scaling with W or R rank, while her W will not deal any damage or proc style.

PROS:

-lets Samira have full control over when she wants to block something

-basically retains Samira's current kit

-can be used as another balance lever

-makes skill expression higher (although debatable)

-is almost power-neutral (more of a QoL change)

CONS:

-can be confusing as to when she used W or just the slash (simple visual change can fix this; alternatively, the slash can instead become a 1 bullet ult)

-could maybe push her into high ban rate

-could make her clunkier depending on how the slash works with her other abilites

-other things I can't think about.

Overall, this change could be possibly done in different, better and healthier ways. But it would improve the Samira's gameplay, and fix one of the many problems she already has as a Mythic-era champion that didn't quite adapt to current League philosophy.

I am happy to hear your thoughts!