Exploiting Summoner Spells Potential To Change Game Mechanics
Greetings dear rioters, I decided to make this thread after I came up with and idea trying to sleep at 5 am just to realize I had college in 1 hour, but that is irrelevant.
My idea consist of something relatively simple and attempts to solve what I consider is league of legends biggest flaw, and that is that the game has become kind of stagnant (the same thing that made certain MMO lose 5 million players). What do I mean when I say the game is stagnant? I mean that it is essentially the same as in season one, I mean sure we have new champions, new items and a couple new mechanics but still the game doesn't feel fresh (which is fine for a game with an expiration date like an rpg but is terrible for a game like league) it becomes boring for many players after a while and they end up playing just aram of fooling around trolling games (I don't have statistics but this happened to everyone I knew who played lol since 2011 [the year I started just after Viktor was released]). So how can we solve that? we change the game mechanics and here is where summoner spells come in handy.
As of now summoner spells are really damn boring (sorry riot), like seriously, they have so much potential and are wasted, here are some examples:
Flash is a very simple yet versatile summoner spell, but it has something that makes it boring, it's huge cooldown, having such a long cooldown means that after you use it you have to stay behind your tower or team mates dutring some potencially (and sometimes painful) boring 5 minutes.
Ignite is the summoner spell I have most problems with, this is a dot, boom that's it, it doesn't change anything on the game, it's not flashy (pun not intended), it's not game changing nor is it fun to use, it is just a signal to go in or not and it could be so much more.
I guess I have made my point clear with these two examples so I can move on to my proposal, make _summoner spells short cooldowns (about 40 seconds) with "outrageous effects" that allow massive outplays and counterplay to said outplays _. These are some examples that can really change the way LOL is played:
Instead of just granting movement speed and removing unit collision make it grant less speed, but allowing you to dash (sort of like lucian's pursuit or ahri's rush) 2 times over the next 10 seconds, this allows not only to outplay skillshots, but also to traverse the map walls allowing some extremely versatile games. This can also make some characters intantly viable like annie (and can also make others completlely broken but keep reading).
Flash can also become more of what it already is by adding one simple thing, make it grant stealth for 1 second after it is used (but revealing the direction it was used to allow counterplay) this simple change allows flash to be used as a defensive and offensive (for positioning) ability.
Cleanse is a summoner with a beautiful concept (removing not the cc but the weakness of a champion with no movement skills, which shows the viability of my ghost concept since riot already has something similar ingame) that can be translated to something great, instead of removing cc once, make it activate a 10 second buff (or less) that allows you to reactivate the spell to generate a spellshield for 0.5 (or less) seconds that blocks CC and 50% of the damage (I offer a balance option ahead), this would make almost every single skirmirsher viable against any mage or cc heavy champion.
Ignite needs to be completely replaced with something you guys already made, a pseudo URF so to speak. Make the new offensive summoner to increase cooldown reduction by 25 or 30% up to a maximum of 65 or 70% for 5 seconds or so. This allows most mages to fight face to face with most skirmishers and even assasins and since i already proposed an anti cc (cleance, that rewards technical prowess) and a skillshot evading option (ghost) it becomes somewhat balanced (a lot of testing needed obviously), such a simple thing changes completely the way you play a champion, simply upping the speed makes a giant difference and is for some reason extatic as URF showed us.
Heal is by itself a summoner spell that does the kind of thing that i'm proposing, it heals and grants speed making it versatile, but it can be more gamechanging that that. Instead of just healing and speeding make it generate an "arena" (like jarvan's cataclysm but bigger) that grants big health regen to everyone who enters it and nullifies all damage dealt from outside and to the outside, and whoever leaves the area is slowed by 50%. (to make this one more balanced every champion who enters the area has his health topped (to certain point or it would be unfair to nullify completelly assanitation attempts), but only if at least 1 of each team enters the area, same thing with the health regen, if there are no champions from both teams at the same time, the regen stops until both are in) this is the concept i like the most but it would require a lot of testing.
Final Words
To end this thread I want to say some final things, I know that these changes would mean that league of legends loses it's identity, but that is not something necessarilly bad, and I know that these proposals are absolutely insane and silly but that is the point, insane and silly games are fun, and that's the point of games, this even enhances competitive play by allowing pro players display technical prowess on timings and strategies based on massive amounts of movement.
But! what i want to get to your attention is just how much potential is being wasted with current summoner spells, just by changing the two generic spells you choose for each game you can change the whole formula without making changes to every single champion, and the best is they're relatively easy to balance, I hope i could deliver my ideas properly and that this thread isn't consumed by the void. GG.