A Call For Clarity- A Letter To Riot

Dear Riot,

I appreciate you as a company for always looking to improve your game, be it champion updates, behind the scene processes, endorsing a positive community, or being transparent when you explain why you implement different things. You are a company who prides itself on being lucid with your decisions and today I am writing this to gain some understanding. The clarity I seek mainly concerns the champion Anivia and her ultimate, but does branch out to a few other abilities that are initially unclear. There was a thread in 2011 that covered many good points pertaining to Anivia with no recognition or rebuttal from riot. Perhaps now is a better time to bring the issue to light, with your focus on fine-tuning League.

There are many abilities throughout your game with a channeled trait that do not clearly portray their limitations such as Janna's Monsoon, Katarina's Death Lotus, Warwick's Infinite Duress. These are all spells that last for a specified duration and can be interrupted with well placed crowd control. None of these abilities state any kind of channeling, but while active no other abilities may be used nor can you move without terminating the cast. As an experienced League of Legends player this sounds like common knowledge, but thinking back to when I began playing, and when I've helped friends get started I realized just how misleading they really are.

New players will rarely know what is commonly believed to be implied conditions. Look at the wording of Monsoon: "...restores X health to nearby allies each second for 3 seconds" or Death Lotus: "... magic damage per 2.5 seconds." There is nothing to specify the innate channeled aspect that comes with these spells. This confusion is only amplified with a champion like Swain fighting on the Fields of Justice. Look at his Decrepify: "... Over the next 3 seconds, the target takes X magic damage per second and is slowed." and his Torment: "... magic damage over 4 seconds..." Neither of these abilities place Swain in a channeled state and neither can be interupted with any form of crowd control. All of the exmaples have an effect that is not instant so how is one to understand the difference if they lack the experience granting that knowledge?

The issue with Anivia's ultimate Glacial Storm, is a bit more complex. This is the information you provide players in the game: Glacial Storm, Rank 1: Initial Cost 75 mana, Cooldown 6 seconds, TOGGLE: “Anivia calls forth a driving rain of ice and hail, dealing 80+ (ap bonus) magic damage per second and chilling targets, slowing their attack and movement speed by 20%, Drains 40 mana per second”. The problem is that the ultimate is a toggle, but its behavior is inconsistent.

Compare Anivia's ult to any other toggled ability in the game: Swain's Ravenous Flock or Karthus' Defile for example, both are toggled abilities that drain mana over time. In all instances, a toggled ability is forcefully deactivated when the resource being drained is depleted. However upon being knocked up, silenced, or even suppressed only Anivia's Glacial Storm is automatically toggled off.

Now examine how both Anivia's ult and channeled abilities including, but not limited to Nunu's Absolute Zero or Galio's Idol of Durand or Shen's Stand United; you'll find the results are the same, all abilities are cancelled and placed on cool down. Let me remind you that Anivia's ability, unlike the three previous abilities is listed as a toggle and unlike its channeled counterpart she can move and cast other spells while it is active. In regard to its correlation with disables it mirrors that of a channeled cast as opposed to an immobile toggled effect.

This is a plea for clarity! It would be in everyone’s best interest to include the key term channeled in the tool-tip of spells that share its restrictions. It would also help to either include in the tool-tip that hard crowd control effects (knock ups, silences, and suppressions) will cancel Glacial Storm or to change the interaction Glacial Storm has with disrupting effects to match that of other toggled abilities.

Thank you for your time and your consideration!

Sincerely, FeedTheMadness

I would love feedback and thoughts from anyone! Yes it is directed at riot, but I would love to hear anyone's opinion on the matter.