Idea for a Melee-Only Passive on Doran's Blade and Corrupting Potion

JetstreamXT·10/30/2019, 5:27:59 PM·1 votes·592 views

I saw somewhere that Riot was tossing around the idea of creating a passive on Doran's Shield that only works for Melee. One problem: Most of the current top lane meta (fighters) HATE taking Doran's Shield. They don't just want to survive harass; they want to be able to counterattack and take advantage of their opponent's squishiness. Doran's Shield doesn't really allow this. It turns the lane into a sustain lane, where, in actuality, Ranged Champions hold all the cards in the early levels, due to their autoattacks.

This is where Doran's Blade and Corrupting Potion come in. Doran's Blade is a common starter buy for champions like Kled, Aatrox, and other manaless champions, whereas mana-hungry champions like Pantheon and Jax take Corrupting Potion.

However, both of these items are commonly abused by Ranged Champions in the top lane, and let's face it, a Ranged Champion has a HUGE advantage from level 1 against a Melee Champion with the same items. Therefore, in order to counter this, I believe that the best route would be to give both Doran's Blade and Corrupting Potion passives that encourage sustained trades early on, or discourage poke with no follow-up.

Let's start with Corrupting Potion. Currently, Corrupting Potion works like this: for 12 seconds, you regenerate Mana and health. However, more importantly, your autoattacks and abilities (ranged OR melee) leave a 3-second DoT that deals a total of 15 damage, halved for Area of Effect and DoT effects. This hugely benefits ranged in a melee vs ranged matchups, because they are going to have a lot more frequent poke than the melee, who have to commit to a longer trade in order to attack at all, during which they will also be taking damage from the ranged. However, nerfing it for ranged entirely would also create a disruption in Midland balance, so we can't do that.

Here is what I would do: start by halving Corrupting Potion's damage for both melee and ranged, then halve it again for ranged attacks and abilities. However, then you could add a stacking Darius Hemorrhage effect in place of just refreshing the burn, allowing it to stack back up to its original values. This would reward Corrupting Potion being used as intended, encouraging players to go all-out during the duration of Corrupting Potion, and would force both ranged and melee to commit to trades in order to deal its full damage. The duration could be tinkered with in order to ensure ranged and melee are doing more than just a periodic single autoattack to refresh the buff, but you get the general idea.

Next, let's talk about Doran's Blade. Doran's Blade is simple, it gives 8 AD, 80 Health, 3 percent Lifesteal, all of these bonuses being range-agnostic. Now, nerfing it for ranged outright would affect botlane too much, so I've come up with a passive idea similar to the one for Corrupting Potion for Doran's Blade, specifically for Melee: Gunbreaker: whenever you deal non-periodic, melee-range damage to a ranged Champion, reduce the damage their autoattacks deal to you by 2 for 5 seconds, stacking up to 4 times. This would greatly encourage ranged champions to kite melee in order to deal full damage, and would reward melee for getting in the ranged champion's face. The bonus would also greatly fall off as ranged get stronger in terms of levels and items, so it won't be OP in the late game.

What do you think of this? Would this change be acceptable to push ranged back from Toplane, or is it too much? Furthermore, would these changes cause balance problems elsewhere that I haven't thought of? If you wish, leave your comments below. Thank you for your time, and have a great day!

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