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Lets talk about the new Dragon

Treetop69·11/24/2014, 1:26:32 AM·3 votes·936 views

Lets talk about this new dragon mechanic. At this point 5 dragon is greater than a baron buff. Teamwide red ontop of all the other buffs? In games players only value buff 1 and buff 5. 2-4 are ignored.

The biggest problem with dragon is the gold loss, if your team is behind you cant catch up as easily, and far MORE importatnly. Being forced to contest. You see, unlike old dragon which was just gold this is team wide perma buffs. If it is just gold you can turtle, farm jungle on short timers, and wait to catch up in gold and be able to 6 item end-game team fight.

Now, if that same team is behind, the longer jungle timers keep them behind, and having easy dragon control from being ahead means you can snowball the buffs. The team behind though MUST UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES contest the dragon. Even if it is a 5 for 0 and the winning team gets their 5th dragon.

If you dont contest they get all 5 and then it is gg. Right then and there. You have no chocie. You fight and die or turtle and die.

If you wanted to win last season it was easy, farm your lane, dont die, ward for ganks, fight as a team mid game, farm jungle when oppurtunity presents itself. Mid/late win a fight and shove mid, get inhib. At this point it is in the bag, siege top to be close to baron, your top laner goes bot to split push with tp, when one peels mid to stop supers and 1 peels bot to stop split have split tp into the 5v3 dive, drop 3 of them, other 2 wont go in, take tower, take 2nd inhib. Repeat with 3rd inhib, get baron, come for the nexus.

As soon as you get that first inhib the game is over if you play it right. In the bag. Done.

But with this new dragon? You just take champs that spike early/mid, farm dragon as fast as possible, and at 35 min with 5 stack push mid and win. Take poke heavy comps with alot of mobility. YOu just use the buff to skit and do dmg, poking at towers and siegeing. The rest of the under-vauled but still op dragon buffs seem to encourage this. Minion dmg to help the minion waves chunk towers. MS to help you kite and poke. tower dmg to make caitlyns shots hit that much harder. a dmg boost to help you win the fight. and then the slow and true dmg buff.

Dragon buffs are made to make you WANt to just sit in mid like a brick and let sidelanes auto push and take inhibs while you just camp. Cait, Janna, Warwick, Ziggs, and Gnar would make an epic team. They all have poke, escape, range, siege, and itd be a tough nut to crack with any comp at all.

And if a team is EVER far enough ahead to just zone you out of your own jungle then the game is theirs no matter what. Because of these drag buffs.

This violently changes the enitre game. Not just the meta. The entire shebang.

p.s.

This post was made because i made a thread, it got like 2 downvotes, and then it dropped off the board because two people disagreed with what i have said without bothering to really refute or talk about anything.

2 Comments

krobar9411/24/2014, 2:10:06 AM2 votes

I agree that the new dragon definitely changed how my friend's and I play. We currently play the AoE game and make contesting us at dragon incredibly difficult and try to take it for ourselves. I find that whoever gets the first dragon will get the second and so on. It feels like a game of snowball.

The first buff is just insane. 8% more AD and AP, which your adc can exploit very well as they already have a ton of multipliers. Crit, Attack speed, armor penetration, and now 8% more AD is a lot of multipliers, and this helps them get ahead and snowball just that much more. This makes getting the second dragon easier.

The second buff? Good luck try to stay safe under your tower. We'll blast away your minions and get a ton of easy farm from the jungle and eventually poke down your towers. I believe this extra damage against minions and monsters also includes dragon, which makes it much easier for a quick steal or take the second time. Oh, big point here. Life stealing off of monsters and minions is now much better. I did a crit for about 1952 as Corki before on a minion. With blood thirster, sustaining through draining is now a bit easier. It sounds like a small point, but all these small points come together to make a much bigger lead.

Third buff: trying to gank us or catching us off guard is now much harder because we are just that much faster. This makes split pushing a bit easier as we can just walk away. In general, killing the other team becomes much more difficult. We're also able to get to the dragon much faster and set up shop before the other team. My opinion? This buff is not ok. A team with Janna is damn near impossible to actually catch.

Fourth: Goodbye towers. That ADC, with their 8% more AD, will just destroy towers.

Fifth: GG. All buffs are doubled as well as a bonus 150 true damage on hit. To be real, the other team generally won't even get this buff because the game should be done by the fourth one.

To summarize, Dragon gets easier the more you do it, while the other team must struggle to fight back against a team that's already ahead and pulling just that much further away. Dragon now feels more important than Baron at this point, which is a strange thing. Before, it was simple what these objectives did. Dragon was for an early lead with a little more change in your pocket and experience and Baron was for when you wanted to end the game. Now, Dragon feels like the end all be all and Baron is for when Dragon isn't up.