Do you think the dragons feel too weak or underwhelming?

Lùmen··7 votes·484 views

Because I do... They just sit there (fly), spitting X balls at you. (X = specific element)

5 Comments

Teridax682 votes

To some extent, yes. While Baron is not in the best spot right now, at least he has some effects and abilities that challenge the player and can be played around. By contrast, the drakes don't really do this, and the rework the Dragon received in Preseason 5, which turned it into a more challenging objective with an extra ability, got reverted, leaving it back to a state where fighting the thing amounts to just paying a health, mana and time cost. The differences in the drakes' stats and attack patterns are also meant to encourage different strategies for clearing them, yet in practice that never happens, and merely makes the objective a little less consistent in how much it affects your health bar. The drakes could definitely stand to have some more interesting gameplay effects, so that they really do feel like more of a boss fight.

On the flipside, the other issue I take with the drakes is the way they give out power, which I think is itself not the most appreciable: instead of giving out just one, clearly recognizable effect, drakes instead reward a whole bunch of different, permanent stat boosts, which is pretty much the worst way of conveying power. It's the reason why the Cloud Drake had to have its out-of-combat movement speed massively buffed, purely because its reward felt weak, even when statistically it did increase win rates by a fair amount. This, in addition to the drake RNG, is one of the reasons why I feel the elemental drakes were a gameplay miss, even if aesthetically and thematically they're really cool. I think in the end it might be better to revert to just one drake in terms of gameplay and bonuses awarded, while still randomly cycling through elemental drakes for cosmetic purposes.

DemonBoneJangles1 votes

i agree, mostly because everyone still complains about how useless the air drake is, and to some extent all the drakes are semi useless with their differing powers and bonuses.

the two most contested drakes in most of the games ive played (not in general) are infernal and earth drakes, (imo infernal should be a separate drake and the current "fire" drake should be the inferno) the stat increases the others give are very one sided to certain team comps and near useless on others,

example the ocean drake gives you greater health regen which is fine, unless your team is a group of squishy champs who build some form of lifesteal at which point your lifesteal is healing you faster than the drake buff making it useless.

SDhrek1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Requiem of Bones,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=K3VEwB8f,comment-id=0001,timestamp=2017-09-26T14:12:50.935+0000)

i agree, mostly because everyone still complains about how useless the air drake is, and to some extent all the drakes are semi useless with their differing powers and bonuses.

the two most contested drakes in most of the games ive played (not in general) are infernal and earth drakes, (imo infernal should be a separate drake and the current "fire" drake should be the inferno) the stat increases the others give are very one sided to certain team comps and near useless on others,

example the ocean drake gives you greater health regen which is fine, unless your team is a group of squishy champs who build some form of lifesteal at which point your lifesteal is healing you faster than the drake buff making it useless.

A lot of plat players and up say that air drake is one of the best drakes, including myself.

DemonBoneJangles1 votes

[{quoted}](name=Zero De Knowl,realm=NA,application-id=3ErqAdtq,discussion-id=K3VEwB8f,comment-id=00010000,timestamp=2017-09-27T09:39:42.931+0000)

A lot of plat players and up say that air drake is one of the best drakes, including myself.

I understand that in differing tiers of play different things take priority, for most of my games it just happens that the earth and fire drakes spawn more than the air and ocean drakes, I'm not saying that the drakes are completely uselss, they just aren't very impactful unless you can grab 2 or 3 of the same kind, something that depending on the flow of the game and the teams junglers may not happen, if you base the usefulness of the drakes off only one drake kill (pick your element) then you are not getting as much benefit as say grabbing 3 of the same drake in a row, and even with elder dragon doubling the bonuses that one air or ocean drake is only marginally better than grabbing 2 and not even close to what you would have after grabbing 3 of that drake.

so in a sense all the drakes are weak when compared to say the standalone buff elder dragon gives or the tower pushing ability that herald gives or the game closing power that baron gives.

but everyone has their own opinion I like yours as well

[slayer-jinx-catface]

Salson1 votes

Yes, they need more HP and the ability to apply grievous wounds.

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