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@Riot: Elemental dragons, their potential problems for competitive LoL and a possible solution

Vesarixx··4 votes·447 views

In a new video on his channel Last Shadow brings up some valid points about the issues with having these elemental dragons work on an RNG system, team comps that would have otherwise dominated an enemy teams composition could potentially have their advantage invalidated by the enemy team sneaking a dragon or be forced into an inopportune fight due to elements they are unable to plan for. I like the idea behind each of the dragons but the RNG aspect means it will likely either end up causing balancing issues or end up being scrapped as a concept.

As a solution I would suggest the addition of 4 new items to league which would function as dragon bait, these items would work similar to pink wards revealing enemy stealth units but only having 3 health that regenerates if they are not hit for a short amount of time, each type of bait would imbue the regular dragon with a specific one of the elemental effects, but would require a short channel to activate, if the dragon is killed without this channel being completed it gives global gold once more instead of the elemental effect.

These bait items would be limited to only having 1 at a time and would only be purchasable by players who have smite to prevent everyone on the team from buying one and just spamming it during a dragon fight, therefore the enemy could contest the elemental effect by interrupting the channel and destroying your bait item, wait for you to complete the channel before contesting to get a buff you both benefit from, or complete the channel using a bait type that doesn't benefit you prior to dragon even being contested in order to lock in the elemental type of the dragon to something less valuable to you, taking the threat of a specific buff out of the equation until the next dragon spawn.

This would mean a lot more consistency for these effects and add another layer of strategy around the dragon, easily making it a more valuable objective for either team instead of randomly benefiting one more than the other on an RNG system.

4 Comments

ModWulf Helhammer1 votes

They don't need to change the RNG aspect of it because each dragon benefits fighting a particular just as much as getting it benefits that comp.

Fire: more damage is good for everyone. Water: more mana to keep up poke comps, but more health to fight against them Wind: more MS to keep up rotations, but also more MS to out rotate the split pushing team and render them moot Earth: more damage for the sieging team, but more damage on epic monsters for the other team to sneak a baron and stop the seige

Vesarixx1 votes

They benefit each comp to different degrees though, wind would benefit a split pushing comp far more than a team fighting comp for example, and the mana regen from the water dragon would be of more use to a poke comp than to a hard engage comp. With the spawns being random it means that rather than having the ability to form a strategy before the game to utilize a particular dragon type you only have the option for disaster planning if that protect the hyper carry team comp ends up getting 2-3 fire dragons, it's not healthy design to have an aspect of the game that could tip the balance in favor of a particular team use an RNG system, while it might not be that big of a deal in solo queue it could have a huge impact in competitive.

ModWulf Helhammer1 votes

Each dragon counters what it provides (although I will admit the earth one not so much as the others), so the mana a poke comp could get is countered by the health that the enemy gets.

That's something I see a lot of people not getting about it: there is no downside to any of the dragons. They all are universally beneficial, either to increase the strength of your comp, or to decrease the opponent's

Vesarixx2 votes

Balancing the dragons so that each benefit they give equally offsets the benefit it would give an alternate comp is not possible for a game with this many variables, the mount of health that would allow a team with multiple tanks or bruisers to keep up with a poke comp would be far less than a team with more carry oriented champions, in the case specifically of the water dragon a team with few mana users might not really have interest in taking a water dragon but would need to contest it in order to keep the enemy from attaining the buff, which would be fine if the team could plan reliably for this, if teams are forced to contest 3 of the same dragons in a row that even if the value for them is significantly less than the benefit to the enemy team then this team is placed at quite a disadvantage.

As far as each buff being universally beneficial the announcement page blatantly states the situation where each would be ideal, team fighting, objective control, siege and poke, and rotating around the map respectively. They even state a goal of this change as something to make the dragon less generic and more of a specialized objective:

"we instead set out to create a unique ecosystem of adaptation that augments a variety of team compositions and strategies." http://na.leagueoflegends.com/en/featured/mid-season-magic

The big issue here is the removal of a teams agency during a game, rather than being able to proactively form a strategy around the dragon teams are forced to think reactively. You can't form a team comp around a specific dragon buff since that dragon may never spawn, but you need to plan for the potentially disastrous effects that each spawn could have relative to each team. The buffs themselves seem great, as a Quinn player having the wind buff seems like it would be incredibly helpful and the water dragon might actually allow Galio to build more effectively and become a much stronger pick, but both of these would rely far too much on the RNG element, which should never be a win condition.

RNG does have a place in games, even competitive, but in a game like league that relies on perfect imbalance there is no way to reliably balance the best and worse case scenarios for each of these buffs, because each team will have a drastically different power curve. Riot has enough trouble balancing individual kits around powerful abilities, just look at the balance history for any of these champions Skarner, Quinn, Draven, Galio, Poppy, Kayle. Skarner has had 3 different kits with the same problem since so much of his power is budgeted to his ult, and people still haven't completely realized just how broken Quinn could be right now.

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