@Riot: 10/9 PBE update makes the game needlessly complex
If you haven't already seen the planned changes for Season 5 preseason, you can read them here. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Done? Let's begin.
Riot, one of your primary gameplay design tenets is avoiding burden of knowledge and making things quickly and easy understandable. This is a GREAT way to go about making a game and I commend you for reworking or removing abilities/items that are needlessly complex. It also makes learning the game a lot simpler than trying to learn something like DotA, because everything is relatively easily understood. However, these most recent PBE changes are completely counter to that philosophy.
Smite used to be a clear-cut, simple Summoner spell that didn't make much to learn. Now it's a nightmarishly complex ability that will be both difficult to balance and difficult for newer junglers to figure out. It also means that instead of simply using Smite to clear faster, I have to be conscious of when and what I Smite. Did I want the Execute damage from the golems, or do I want to stick with my current Wolf Sentry? Maybe I just want to clear the golems quick and go back - but oh wait, if I do that I lose the buff that I wanted to keep. You see the issue?
Compounding this further is the fact that you can UPGRADE your Smite, which makes it all the more unclear as to what Smite can and cannot do. I'm all for tactical flexibility, but taking a former simple, noncombat spell and turning it into this complex monstrosity is needless.
Burden of knowledge aside, the shift from champion power from the early to late-game is even more confusing. Games already go on much longer than they used to thanks to other changes throughout Season 4, and this will just compound it. On top of that, the "homefield advantage" change allows for too much ability to stall out pushes. I get that long games frequently allow for more diverse play and lets you see your champion at their maximum potential, but I'd prefer to occasionally play games that don't go over forty minutes.
The Relics in the river are needless as well. Splitpushing doesn't need the kind of buff that those relics will give it, and it seems odd that you'd add something to the map that gives little benefit to anyone NOT splitpushing. Work the relic effect into an item, maybe, but keeping it on the map should not be a solution.
I really don't understand the Baron buff changes. Before, the buff simply made your whole team stronger - that's easy enough to understand. Now it's some kind of strange Push-buff that affects the minions more than it affects the champions who took the objective. It's an unneeded change and should be reverted.
Overall, if this is the direction Riot plans on taking League of Legends in Season 5, I will be most disappointed. This was one of the few games that could be understood mostly at a glance, and to watch it fall to unnecessarily complex mechanics would be heartbreaking.
