Dragon buff only benefits the carries, and too passive.

Through the preseason patch, Riot has changed the rewards for slaying the dragon. The change was done to fix pre-existing problems with dragons giving global gold and make the game more interesting. I believe it indeed produced some positive effects, but I also feel the change has some drawbacks could have been done in different way.

Before suggesting an alternative dragon reward, let’s see what Riot is intending with the dragon change.

1. Introduce strategic diversity through making objectives incomparable. Previously, the way to snowball was essentially unique: farm up more gold and experience than the opponent and use gold lead to win the team fight. Taking tower, farming up minions and jungle, killing enemy champions, and taking dragon were indistinguishable as they all give gold and experience; one could easily evenly trade the top tower for a dragon after avoiding a team fight.
2. Slow down the snowball from early gold advantage. The team which takes the first dragon without any trade-off had won the game very easily. The global gold advantage from the dragon meant stronger team fight and the next dragon could had been taken even more easily, making the losing team little chance to come back. The dragon no longer gives gold and all buffs except for the first and fifth one doesn’t help in team fight. The dragon itself is also stronger and tougher to kill with dragon buff stacks, making it easier to contest.
3. Encourage the vision control and team fight around the dragon Recall the push meta when a team could just push the turret fast, ramp up the global gold, keep poking/rotating/split pushing and win without any serious team fight. The inner and inhibitor turret change made such strategy weaker and winning the team fight around the dragon is now the new way to snowball. The river scuttle and stronger dragon with better graphics made dragon team fight more interesting.
4. Rewards the team which has been consistently taking the dragon. In contrary to the push Meta, there was also stall Meta. When champions like and were strong, a team could just give up all the objectives other than inhibitor turret and focus on clearing the minion wave to until 40 minute where global gold matters little because the carries already have full items. Those games lacking team fight and strategy were really boring to watch. Stacked dragon buff with baron buff is extremely strong for defenders. It immediately ends the stalemate and forces defenders to contest dragons and team fight.

It seems Riot has done quite a good work changing the meta and make the game more oriented towards team fights. Nonetheless, there are many things I feel current change negatively influenced upon.

1. The buffs are not visible and passive. While dragon slayer buffs are ‘visible’ by red aura trailing the champion, one can’t really feel the buff except for the third stack, where champions moves a lot after sudden, and fifth stack. While one can think “Yes, I can now be stronger since I can get my trinity force, infinite edge, or deathcap”, one rarely think “I’m stronger now because I have 6% increased ap, deal more damage to turret and minion!” Buffs are all passive. One can’t really choose the advantage to take with the buff as one might had done with extra gold from dragon. (More vision? More item?), which makes reward less interactive.

2. Buffs reward some champions more than the other. The first buff benefits AD and hybrid champions more than mana-based , penetration-based , and tanky champions least. The second buff benefits champions focused on sieging and split pushing rather than team fighting. poking turret and split pushing would make good use of the additional damage to turret, while would take essentially no good use out of it.
3. Buffs are not really incomparable While they are different from just giving additional gold, their values can be estimated and thus trade-offs can still take place. The first buff is comparable to half longsword (early game), the second buff worth very little and the third buff is comparable to alacrity enchantment.

Thus, for the reasons above, I want to suggest new buffs that would be more unique, active, noticeable, fair, and still achieve the original intent of dragon reward change. This is suggestion and my rationale:

1. Dragon’s scale: Reduce damage taken from minions and non-epic monsters by 20% In the preseason jungle, sustain was essential for a champion to be an effective jungler. Junglers with no sustain ability performed poorly and couldn’t take advantage of the new cool smite features because it is very hard for them to jungle without smite. While this still gives sustain junglers early edge over nonsustain junglers, it would allow junglers to more actively use strategically midgame. Part of the reason why melee autoattackers are not so popular in top lane is the minion agros. This change can indirectly bring more diversity to the top lane champion pool. Season 5 is all about minions. They are stronger and there are buffs (Nasher) strengthens them as well. Although it is indeed interesting, I think the only counter-play to that is to melt them down through aoe spells because they are too powerful for even tanks to tank them. -no more adc/support get raped by minions and get frustrated.

2. Dragon’s heart: Increase the duration of potions, elixirs, and stealth ward by 20% and improves the effect of potions by 20%. After the lane phase, there is no meaningful choice of leaving an item slot for , as vision control and additional item is way more important and potion heals only fixed amounts, making them cost inefficient. After taking this buff, the players would have additional meaningful choice of buying consumable for sustain even after the lane phase. Reworked elixirs are not being used frequently as they used to be, unless its ad casters or ap champs that can poke . The part of the reason is that they are too expensive for the effect. This buff would increase the cost efficiency of elixirs to make choice of using gold for elixir more meaningful and encourage even rarely used ones to be more safely used. After the introduction of and , very few players are actually buying to actively participate in vision game. Even players do buy wards usually opt for . This buff would encourage even players relying on trinket and support for vision to take more part on vision game and increase the strategic value of .
3. Dragon’s vision: Increase the line of sight of champions, towers, minions, and wards by 20% This buff would encourage more strategic positioning of champions as players can spread out more to get more visions of the map. Also, tower control and minion wave management would be more crucial and vision game more important. The current 5% MS bonus is not healthy, because even if a player misposition himself and put him in danger of being surrounded, he could get away easily with faster movement speed and make chasers who did good strategic positioning by leading him to such trap frustrate. Also, one team in overall faster than the other discourage slower (and generally losing) team from expanding and aggressively warding because it is easier for them to get caught, even if they do not overextend, because of the movement speed difference.
4. Dragon’s wisdom: Reduce the cooldown on active items by 20% (this includes ) There are a lot of new fun active items in this new season but except for some , they has been uncommon, because they are usually cost inefficient due to active. This buff would encourage players to get more of such item and enjoy cool actives. The way to deny enemy vision is usually by . As vision war intensify, players would find more use for the trinkets.
5. **Aspect of the Dragon: Grant 10% cooldown reduction, 10% movement speed and temporary double all other bonuses and attacks burns enemies for 2 seconds dealing 20 true damage per second. ** The fifth buff are the game closer and ought to be really strong. Yet, it could be not only strong but also can grant even more utility. AD and AP buff overlaps with baron buff making dragon buff less unique. Let’s grant something different from the baron one. The raw strength is a bit lowered to give defenders more chance in fight and make attackers rely on massive utility boost to close the game. (more thinking, less crushing)

The buffs above are not just trait boosts but buffs that leads to other meaningful choices, which is the goal Riot is intending for the new season. They do not also make the team who gets it first to snowball hard and necessarily get the next dragon because while buffs give noticeable utilities that can lead to various advantages, themselves do not help in team fight when dragon is contested. A player still can use elixirs and active items without the dragon buff and do vision control. Because a lot of buffs are focused on vision control and strategic movements, it would be more fun to watch how competitive teams use such advantage cleverly instead of having just more raw strength to crush in the team fight without leaving them hope. The buffs are very unique and incomparable. In exchange of tower gold and dragon buff, there is meaningful trade-off between utility and strength from better items. They are cumulative; the more stacks a team have, the greater reward next dragon provides. They all provoke players to take more actions like using more actives and consuming more elixirs which all champions can equally take advantages of. Lastly, they are more fair, as this kind of buff can be beneficial to all kinds of champions: carries, tanks, supports, junglers, compared to the current one which helps only damage dealers.

Along with the change, I suggest new buff timers: red and blue 4 minutes, dragon 5 minutes, and baron 6 minutes. Because the duration of the buffs are lowered, junglers are having more trouble influencing the lane with those buff, so they can have it more often. Also, the game gets a little boring when defending teams just sit under inner turret and there is no buffs or dragons to contest. Because the dragon timer is so long, it is extremely difficult to see stacked dragon buff which take at least 30 mins. I believe reducing dragon timer would allow players to enjoy new cool dragon buffs and boast ultimate 5 dragon buff stacks more often. Also, I feel like Ancient Grudge debuff (grants the Dragon 20% increased damage against and 7% damage reduction against champions with Dragon buff/ per stack) needs to be strengthen. Many times, losing team gets into situation where they know enemy is doing dragon and they are too strong to contest, but they can't really take any action against it except for throwing a jungler for a steal, because the enemy can still take the dragon very quickly without much health loss. In order to give the losing side more opportunity to take other forms of advantage to catch up, slow down the snowballing, and increase the chance for an epic steal, the damage reduction should be also increased to 20%. Furthermore, it should be allowed to take multiple elixirs at the same time. When a player has full build, he feels like wasting additional gold which is annoying. There should be an outlet to exhaust such extra gold to allow players to make use of extra gold in late game. (1.6k gold every 3 minutes is sufficient even for the late game)

Thank you for reading.