How to get rid of no farm top without nerfing Frostfang

No farm top is unfun to play against. That’s not much of a question in the community right now. Naturally many players might jump onto Frostfang as the problem as allowing the player to farm after quest completion leads to most of the problems with this strategy. Letting the player keep up in gold, and then double down on gold generation once the timer reaches 10 minutes is an absurd amount of gold generation, so naturally it seems like a good way to nerf this would be to add the gold generation lockout to quest completed Frostfang. I’d argue that not only would this not be sufficient, but would cause massive quality of life problems for Support players. I do offer an alternative though, and it doesn’t involve changing Frostfang at all, and might even lead to good changes across the rift.

So let’s say you add farm lockout to completed Frostfang. What would the strategy look like after this? Well, for one the top laner will never be able to double down on gold after the quest is done, so that’s a plus in nerfing the strategy. However, this wouldn’t get rid of it completely. If the top laner and jungler are coordinated, the jungler can do a pseudo-funnel and farm waves top while the top laner continues to almost keep up in gold by purely harassing the opposing laner. Furthermore, this will negatively affect support players like myself that favor Spellthief’s supports. Later in the game, you can’t always rely on your team for wave control in solo queue, so when you have to take a wave as a caster support, it’s nice to not be missing out on gold and extra damage from Frostfang too, but if the lockout is added, then it will no longer be the case, and supports would have to sacrifice even more for the core game strategy of wave control. However, I propose a different solution which will not only cause the no farm top strategy to be worse, but can also increase quality of life for every other lane role on the map.

A while ago, Riot changed the gold distribution in minion waves. Nowadays, cannon minions are worth 1/3-1/2 of the gold in each wave they appear in. Since the no farm top strategy let’s you farm the cannon minions only while not missing out on too much gold generation, you’re still getting about 1/9-1/6 of the gold per wave on average in the laning phase. I propose that to give some of the gold per wave back to melee/caster minions, no farm top will be nerfed enough to the point where it will at the very least me much weaker, and maybe even not be viable anymore at all. Top Laners that do farm the melee and caster minions will get more wave gold compared to the no farm laner, so they have more of a chance to get ahead than how it is now. Not only that, but let’s look at how this would affect other roles too. If I’m a carry player, and I miss a cannon minion, I’m missing out on 60+ gold. This feels terrible in the long run because as I said before that’s over 1/3 of the gold in cannon waves. Obviously players that are better at last hitting should be rewarded, but missing out on that much gold is a massive disadvantage even if you miss only one or two cannon minions. Similarly, melee supports will get a quality of life buff because in situations where they are forced to use their relic stacks on melee or caster minions due to being harassed or having a teammate that doesn’t know how relic shield works, they also won’t fall nearly as behind if the change I propose gets implemented. This change will have positive affects across all lanes, and will also heavily nerf no farm top.

Now I don’t know how the exact numbers should be changed. That would require a lot of testing, but even a small change like +2 to melee, +1 to caster, and -10 to cannon would cut that cannon gold ratio to less than 1/3 per wave, and about 1/10 of the total wave gold early game. As a support player, I ask you don’t nerf Frostfang to the ground and make caster supports feel as bad as melee supports do right now. There are plenty of other options to look at, and I hope that I put at least one more in the minds of the balance team at Riot.