What if Dragon respawned every 10 seconds?

SerBlaise·1/10/2017, 8:37:50 PM·1 votes·844 views

Inspired by some of the dragon posts, I had an idea. What if dragons spawned almost immediately after each other? (actual timing could vary, but just think "much much more often than currently") In addition:

  • Dragons occur in a set order (e.g. cloud, mountain, air, fire)
  • Dragons do more aoe damage but slightly less damage overall and apply grievous wounds
  • **Dragon's buff is nerfed **
  • after 4 dragons, there is a longer cooldown before the next dragon.

What does this do?

Dragon fights are now battles of attrition. Uncontested, you have the ability to sit and take dragon buffs all day. However, you will have to take damage to do so. Each successive dragon withers you down, making it easier for the opposing team to contest.

Why is this any better than the current system?

Currently, Dragon is something you almost always:

  1. Sneak
  2. Take after successful kill(s)

1 is not incredibly viable at all levels of play. 2 means your team is ALREADY at an advantage, and now you have an additional advantage, which leads to these massive snowball games that swing heavily. Now, I get that snowballing is simply a thing in league. It's not going away. But the thing about dragon is that it's almost never a strategic decision your team makes when they don't have an edge. Nobody says anymore "hey let's go do dragon" without having at least one kill on the map or having forced the enemy bot to go back to base. It's way too risky to just group and drag 5v5; the dragon doing damage means the team that starts it always is at a disadvantage, and loosing the teamfight means you loose drag and the enemy team has 5 minutes to snowball their success even further before you can even think about evening the dragon count. This means that the only real strategy is "take drag if it's safe".

This is why dragon is boring. It's not the buffs themselves. It's that you only take it when you KNOW you can take it. So what do my suggestions do?

  • Loosing a dragon becomes less of a deal. You get another shot in 10 seconds, and the buff isn't as big. So because it's less of a risk, you can consider doing it without having taken any objectives or secured any kills. This makes for more interesting team fights instead of dragon being only taken as a double dip prize for winning a recent fight.

  • It is now easier to contest the second dragon, because the enemy team is weakened by the first. Same with the third, and fourth. This incentives the enemy team to actually come to dragon and contest instead of just trading objectives. While strategically interesting, trading objectives is pretty boring. Now you could potentially give Drag 1, take a tower, Run to drag while the finish D2, fight, win, Take D3, and get contested on during D4. IDK about you but that sound's WAYYY more exciting then "shit, bot lane just died and they're taking drag, guess I'll wack top turret a few times". Even if the enemy tries to take it after securing kills, they really only get D1 before you respawn and can get back to contest it!

  • A longer cooldown has to be instated at some point (I'm picking the 4th dragon), because otherwise all other mini games and objectives (jungle, minions, towers until one team grabs a significant dragon lead) might become irrelevant. But internal testing could determine which is better (it might make 5v4 with 1 splitting vs full 5v5 contesting a more interesting strategic choice).

So in sum, instead of one drag fight, you do four in a row quickly, with each successive one being HARDER to take instead of easier. Thematically, I think it even sounds cool to face off against each successive dragon at greater peril. Make of it what you will.

6 Comments

ph1234k1/10/2017, 8:54:54 PM1 votes

This sounds like you want to change Drake from the game altering objective that it is to a min-maxable jungle camp.

Also, I think it would be abused hard and then get reverted back to a state in which your new system is in place but the buff isn't actually nerfed so that it forces contesting. The reason for that is that if the buff isn't that good then there is no point to contest which means that whoever goes to the dragon just loses the game for allowing turrets to be traded for this nerfed buff. They stay for another one? Take another turret, Again? Turret. Again? Inhib etc.

So it would end up being buffed or just not all that nerfed and be contested the exact same way as the current Drakes otherwise without a strong enough buff then trading for a turret could lose the game.

I also have a personal bias against exchanging the input RNG for more min-maxables, this seems like the opposite direction of season 7. I like my emergent strategy in game rather than something which since set has one optimal way to utilize it.

I hope I don't sound to negative, I don't mean to on these posts lol but when I read my comments I just feel like I am gunning down an idea. I don't mean to stomp anyone's creativity at all, I just wanted to give my personal opinion.

Bronze Bonanza1/10/2017, 11:28:25 PM1 votes

Nunu Are you ready to suffer?