6.9 Drake Randomness

The dragon changes in 6.9 introduced a large degree of randomness into the game. Certain drakes are more advantageous to certain team comps and getting good or bad luck with drakes can make the difference between a stronger early game team snowballing to victory, and the later game team coming back to win it.

Let's talk about infernal drake first. Maybe player perception plays a part in this, but this is the dragon everyone always wants to contest. This dragon is stronger than old 1st dragon, and now it can stack. An early game team getting lucky with 2 infernal drakes in a row will almost certainly give them the game. Getting 2 mountain drakes however will give them a slightly faster baron later on and a bit more pushing power, which you would get from the infernal drake anyway.

I've had back to back games where my team took 2 mountain drakes and a cloud drake early, then got beat by a better scaling team, and the very next game the other team managed to take 3 infernal drakes in a row to start the game. You could say that the situation is extremely unlikely, but that's exactly the point. Why should random chance affect how strong the buffs a team gets from the same objective are?

And while I'm on the topic, please make the icons more distinctive. Cloud drake is the worst offender here by far. Why is a yellowy orange triangular fire shaped icon used for cloud drake? Was a grey or blue cloud shaped icon not available? Yes, I get that you learn what they are and can figure it out even if it doesn't make sense, but that's not an excuse for poor visual design.

I would like to see the dragon changes reverted to a state where randomness doesn't play such a huge role in determining whether drake stacking will win the game for you or be a completely useless objective.