I completely feel that the damage is way too high considering most comps have some multiple hard ccs that make counterplay very very slim.
I’ve recently been playing other mobas (Heroes of The Storm, Smite, and MOBA Legends) to see what is different about them and maybe what Riot could adopt to adjust game flow to make the game not feel like a nuke fest.
You’ll notice in Heroes of The Storm that fights seem more balanced and prolonged which I tend to enjoy since when you die you feel that you were just honestly outplayed instead of feeling like the enemy just facerolled faster for the most damage.
Part of this nice balance comes from the fact that classes are not really given extreme flexibility in their level paths. In HOTS, if you are a tank you will rarely out damage a mage. Your talent paths are set up in such a way that your role will never be fully lost depending on which paths you take. It’s refreshing not to have to deal with a full lethality Garen.
Another factor that allows HOTS to be balanced is the fact that getting fed individually doesn’t exist in HOTS, since lvling up (the way you achieve your talents) is a team effort. Sure you can be 11/0 Junkrat, but all your kills won’t make you this extreme hyper carry that blows up everyone. They only help collectively getting your team ahead. This makes the progression of HOTS matches feel nice and steady instead of an unstoppable snowball because someone reached their item and level spikes.
Smite is similar to league, but I feel that their first and second tier items are more gold investment which tends to make getting fed a continuous endeavor since you have to get a few kills just to get first tier or second tier items. There also seems to be various ways for Gods to earn gold in the matches since the jungle has ample camps available and a player can only have one jungle buff at a time (which means junglers share their jungle buffs early since the buffs drop similar to Ivern’s lvl 5 passive).
In MOBA Legends one thing I’ve noticed that league could adopt would be the ability for all champs to buy items in lane. This would help with the complaints about towers falling get too fast. I know Riot worries about how slow games can be, but by adopting this the games would go much faster since you would not have to back and run all the way back to lane. This would also be great for top laners who tend to use TP just to get back to lane after first back.
By implementing this mechanic Riot could then reduce damage and worry less about the speed of the match since about 1/3 of the game is actually spent running back to lanes.