Personal thoughts on Preseason changes. Long Post.

(whoops)

Dear Rito,

I write to you regarding the latest patch and to voice my concerns over many of the changes. I realize that I will sound a little bit like a cry baby and that is mainly because I am only going to tackle the points I disagree with the most. So please keep in mind that I do agree with most of the stuff i dont mention in the following:

1.) Dragon.

Ugh where to start? Issues: Most of the "Rewards" are completely lackluster.

1. Stack: This one seems to be by far the best. It sacles into late game and has a immediate effect on the lanes. Even if it is a minor one. Problem: It is on the first fricking kill. Both teams will get a Dragon once eventually. You can't even prevent it.

2. Stack: In the early game this will make lasthitting feel awkward. In one game you get this buff early and in the next one you don't and you will be like "Wtf is wrong with my lasthitting!?" In the later stages this buff becomes pretty much useless since the waveclearing champs would kill the minion waves "one hit" anyways.

3. Stack: Decent i guess. Nothing to hype about.

4. Stack: Meh. In LoL your team makes a desicion: Defend the tower? -> Go in before the tower falls. Give it up? -> Leave the tower before it falls. This Buff will do nothing but make the enemy team defend or leave ~10% earlier. Who cares?

5. Stack: Broken. Ya if you ever get this far it is huge.

But now take all that "what if" away: The real problem is the time and the "reality of the game": In a perfect world for this new Dragon to work lets say one team clears and gets every single Dragon from minute 5 onward. (And honestely if this is happening, the game is decided waaaay before the 5th dragon.) That means the first time they will get the Aspect-Buff is 35 minutes into the game. Most games dont even last that long. And most certainly not the games in which one team has full Dragon control since min 5.

The complete Idea behind the "new Dragon" is Bullshit. Sorry but whoever mashed this shit together didnt think once about it in the context of an actual game.

2.) The new Turrets: First minor concern: This is all new stuff to learn. It feels pretty random to get a shield just because you stand next to a turret. These are all additional mechanics that i feel work against the whole "clarity" and "easy to learn" concept of LoL.

And for the inhib towers: I really dislike the slow and damage reduction. The slow affects different champs unevenly hard and the damage reduction just feels completely unnatural. Say you are an assassin and 50 seconds earlier you killed the enemy adc with your combo. Now you are siegeing mid and nothing has changed and yet he suddenly survives just because you ate a few ticks of turret laser. Very offputting.

3.) The general direction of this game becoming an RTS with some player controlled champs.

Yes the caption is overdoing it, but many of the preseason changes push the game into that direction.

I dont like it. At all. It sucks.

I dont want to kill Baron so i can watch my siege minions do work. I dont want to buy an elixier to make my creeps stronger. I dont want to buy an entire Item to make my fucking creeps stronger.

I want to fight. I want to destroy that tower. I want to build tanky enough to give my team time to kill the tower.

I don't want the game evolving around my creeps doing it. LoL is a PvP game. It should not become a Player assisted creep-wave simulator.

4.) Balancing. Yes i know, that is what the preseason is for, bla bla bla. I dont want to bitch to much about balance itself but about the things you added which will create so many imbalances. Like didnt you learn anything from the past years? New stuff is fun, but league is a competetive game at its core and if you keep adding to much fancy and fun stuff you will destroy more than you will create.

Examples:

Challenging smite on Warwick. Not only does the harder jungle play into warwicks hands, the 69 TRUE DAMAGE on hit combined with WW ult is broken beyond believe.

Elixiers and them being completely different for ad, ap and others: I can only imagine the pain Elixier of Wrath will bring to solo queue games. As if AD midlaners werent snowbally enough you give them this. I guess Zed wasn't op enough.

5.) Level Up Scaling

While I agree with the Idea itself I just want to throw one point out there: Did you consider that most of the mana reliant champs depend on the mana they get from leveling up in the early laning phase? This is an indirect buff to every champ that doesnt use mana...

6.) Clarity

I will repeat a few point I made before, but here it goes: Many of the additions feel really clunky and incredible lenghty to learn.

Reading the tool tip of "Banner of Command" is like reading a short book.

The new Dragon requires you to learn 5 different buffs and also makes you keep track on how many dragons you and the enemy team have killed.

The new jungle Items are nice and all, but having to deal with 4 different smites will feel very awkward. Unless you put time into learning all of them and what they do and then also checkign ingame on what exactly the enemy jungler bought you will always feel like: Why did that WW ult completely destroy me? Or since when does master yi have a slow!? Why did he just smite me and why dont i deal damage to him?

I bet no one at Riots office can tell you exatly what the new baron does. And no "creeps stronger and recalls faster" isnt good enough of an answer for an competeive game like LoL.

So all in all i have to say that i am mostly diappointed with the preseason changes. I was around for last preseason and the vision and gold income changes felt like a very good step into the right direction. Most of this years changes feel clunky, unnatural and/or in a wrong direction.