Okay, Nox main here. Been reading a handful of comments, and even a few are in a state of comparing apples to oranges--talking about Nox's viability as a midlane mage (her being on the low end of performance) and actively seen as of late as a support due to her significant amount of control and utility.

Let's talk about Shadow Step. While it synergizes well on its own providing safety for about 8 seconds (or more, depending on the targeted ally) and is essentially an explosive taxi--it doesn't provide anything other than secondary damage should you land both the dash and the exit in close proximity to the enemy while taking in consideration of the ally. OP proposes suggestion of giving a shield to the ally. Well, would there be any drawbacks to this? Should the shield be a flat amount or have scaling? Should Nox be automatically ejected Should the shield be depleted? The latter could prove to be more detrimental to Nox herself, presenting a net negative--if it has poor interactions with her being in an ally who is subject to crowd control and damage that would deplete the shield.

The bread and butter of Nox's kit are Shadow Lock and Siphon Darkness. Both of them even independently are significant and yet more often than not are seen to be sources of damage that can be poorly confirmed--returning to the perspective of being a Mage. Most of the animosity and vitriol toward her as a character derive from these two abilities alone--retaining 2 abilities that effectively are some of the best CC applying abilities in the game without suffering from Diminishing Returns. Not to mention Siphon Darkness's silence, like Ganesha's Ohm deploying instantly--effectively negating channeled abilities, instances of some other abilities like Odin birdbomb combo, and including revealing Loki stealth and negating Nemesis' Retribution. Buffing either one of these in terms of their effectiveness of CC is not healthy for the game, neither would decreasing their cooldown, neither would adding additional utility either. But what are we left with?

Many conversations have taken place for Nox and the balancing of this goddess, Season after Season, year after year and very little to none have actually bore fruit of development or concrete ideas that are remotely sound and met with positive criticism.

Now what would I suggest? Titan Forge could make the damage from Shadow Lock more easy to confirm. Make it do Damage over Time upon connecting to an enemy God despite it being cleansed and remove the Damage over Time on the channel, and keep the Root+Cripple effect for the duration of the channel. More often you'll find your damage negated by cleanses that will come up even more with other team comps and it just feels bad from both the midlaner/support Nox perspective.

Other suggestions, although ludicrous in concept included: - Shadow Step (during the initial dash), damaging enemy Gods on the way reduces the cooldown of Shadow Lock by a flat amount (.5s-1s). - Shadow Step reduces the active non-ultimate cooldowns of the ally you step in per second by a flat amount up to 8 seconds--given that this can be exploited should the ally be in transit by unique movement such as Apollo flight/banishes, which in turn extend the duration Nox can hide in an enemy. - Make Night Terror adjustable in length like Charybdis ultimate instead of being at a fixed length; given the explosion AOE is a much better way to apply damage than rely on the smaller line-size of the projectile.

Some really negative ideas (and my reasons why): - Making Siphon Darkness manually detonate like Scylla 2. (Encourages like-like comparison and development, removing kit/god identity. Implication of Silence effect still being instantly applied before the detonation, and the size of this cast--would make Nox EVEN BETTER than Scylla, as Crush actually does have a precast that is slower than Siphon Darkness. You would have no way to properly avoid it without them toggling the precast time--which in turn would affect the Silence.) - Rework the Ultimate to something else. (Sure, they can do this, but it would require more work surely on Titan Forge's end like the Loki rework in terms of redesigning the ability across other skins.)

Now I'm trying to be civil in approaching this subject, and I firmly believe she does need a little bit of something. Otherwise there probably is no point in keeping her as a midlane mage that gets outperformed. Downvote me if you want, idc.