Champions With Jumps - Effectively Immune To Slows / How To Fix That
So it recently occured to me that slows are largely worthless against champions with reliable jumps, dashes, and similar.
Land a good Mega Adhesive as
Singed? They can jump out of it. Drop a Wither on someone as
Nasus? They just ignore it, leaping to safety every time. Toss an Ice Blast in someone's face as
Nunu? Sorry, they still get away.
Why is this a problem? Well it makes champions with these sorts of abilities incredibly hard to stop without hard CC like stuns, snares, taunts, and the like. They don't have to play safely - they can overextend to distances other champions would recoil in horror at the thought of straying to. Junglers without hard CC fail their ganks against such champs, even when performed flawlessly and undetected, and well coordinated with their allies.
Moreover, Slows are quite possibly the single most common form of crowd control. More than eighty champs have slows, and most of those champions also lack reliable hard CC to go with it. That's more than three out of every four champions that jumps make you mostly immune to the CC of.
"Well yeah! The point of a jump is to make you mobile! It's perfectly balanced!"
Not true! Jumps offer a form of power against slows that they don't offer against other types of CC. Stuns, snares, silences, taunts, fears, and all the rest still 100% counteract jumps. Why are slows alone made worthless?
"Well what would you suggest instead?"
A simple, elegant fix. Jumps, dashes, leaps, and all the rest should have their travel distances reduced in proportion to the power of the slows active on them while they are jumping.
If you hit someone with a 75% slow and they're walking, they cover only 25% of the distance they normally would. So why should they be able to jump 100% of their normal distance? Make leaps less effective if you're slowed when trying to jump. After all, in real life people have to get running starts to make effective jumps - why shouldn't they need to do the same here?
"What about counterplay?"
There's still timing and positioning. If you wait until the slow ends before jumping, you get the full distance again and can often still escape. But you have to survive that long first - meaning you have to be a little more careful without your "Get Out Of Slow Free" card.
"Well then what about the opposite situation? What if someone has super high move speed? Should their leaps increase in distance?"
Sure, that sounds fair. People have to make tradeoffs for extra movement speed, so that's fine. As long as you have to actually invest in getting that power, I'm okay with this.
"What about "teleports" and "blinks"?"
To be fair, they should probably be excluded where logical. When you magically relocate from Point A to Point B instantly, being slowed down by a net or ice or whatever shouldn't be a factor.