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Control wards in late game

Madisonivy6969·5/11/2018, 10:55:18 AM·1 votes·1,378 views

Hi all,

I feel that it’s somewhat backwards that when you are full build late game, yours and your team’s ability to effectively ward is rather hindered without being able to buy control wards, which is surely just as important late game, if not more.

Unless you have trackers knife, or are a support, you either have sweeping lens, or warding totem with 1 charge every 90 secs at lvl18.

So, if your team has a chilling/challenging smite jungler (which make up the vast majority of course), you’re bound to have at least 2 or so players with sweeping lens including the supp and the rest with warding totems, so you really gotta rely on your support to do the lion's share of warding.

This has no doubt been mentioned before, but why on earth would Riot not simply add an extra slot/some kind of ‘unsealed spellbook-esque’ switching ability on your trinket to allow you to deploy control wards when full build?

I’ve been playing a lot of Kayn lately, often finding myself in Shadow Assassin due to players’ apparent aversion to playing tanks in silver/gold MMR SoloQ, but I find myself feeling suffocated by only having my 2 warding totems late game which get quickly wiped out by the other team (for example it’s harder to pick someone who decides to grab red buff at 45 min). 5 more control wards on each team would be so much more interesting IMO.

Can anyone think of a good reason this hasn’t been implemented??

Also, please no elitist Yasuo/Darius player-type B.S. like 'play ranked, get better', that sh*t is so ignorant.Galio

1 Comments

DerMangoJoghurt5/11/2018, 11:12:40 AM2 votes

I'm just gonna copy-paste an Ask Riot question and response (also Trackers Knife doesn't exist anymore)

Is there a chance that control wards will ever get their own slot so you can buy them even when fully equipped?

It’s not likely that we’ll implement the solution of building a slot specifically for control wards. We’ve talked about a slot for consumables, both to help with particular roles that end up low on inventory at some point in the game, and to ensure that more players can still play the vision game when they have six items. This is a much more complex issue than folks might assume.

The first issue is that we’re not sure that running out of slots is a bad thing. It’s important that late game is meaningfully different from other phases of the game. Currently, one of the most significant differences is that the map starts to darken. While it can be frustrating to hold off on an item, or have to make difficult decisions about where to use a trinket, those choices can also be meaningful and increase the feeling that stakes are high as games go late.

A second issue is that this a consumable slot is a bit of a band-aid solution. We’re not very happy with a vision system that is attached to the item system. It requires significant amounts of gold, and for most players, it gets strongly position bound. I’d personally be much more excited to start fixing the fundamental problems of the vision system rather than making small improvements to what we have. We’ve been making small iterative improvements to vision for a long time, and I believe we’ve hit the limit of what the system can offer without larger structural changes.