Ubiquitous AOE-- how it diminishes league of legends, and how it relates to the assassin rework

The justification most often provided for allowing so much AOE to exist in the roster is that "it enables the champions to roam from their lane and interact with other lanes".

However, its also a form of plutonium. When your enemy has waveclear, your only defense is to pick something with as much waveclear, seriously restricting champion variety either in terms of what is picked or in terms of how champions are designed or reworked. Thankfully, waveclear is usually gated by mana or some other constraint, but recently we've seen a trend of abusive waveclear that isn't really gated at all.

• On the left hand we have variety of champion design, some with waveclear and some without.
• On the right hand we have variety in interaction, with champions expected to interact with a wide variety of laners via roaming.

Ideally you'd want to have both in your game. Having intense waveclear on everyone is not a solution because it only offers what is in the right hand.

But if you really want what is in the right hand to exist more often than not in league, then what you are saying is that you want the conditions under which champions can roam to occur more often. And currently the biggest reason not to roam is the fact that you'd miss gold and experience from killing creeps.

Rapid waveclear is usually accomplished via wide hard hitting AOE abilities on low cooldowns. And yet, this is precisely the kind of ability that works well in a roam because even if fights become bigger than you though they would, the AOE can dispatch multiple targets.

Champions with little waveclear and a focus on single target damage offer less pushing power so they gank less often, and their ganks are not as effective against groups. The conceptual trade off would be increased performance in lane or better picking power, but generally they do worse in lane because they just get pushed out by the enemy waveclear, and because they miss CS from the hard pushing, their relatively improved picking power is diminished since they are 30 cs down on average.

So AOE both helps you clear waves so you can roam more often, and also makes it so your gank is more effective on average. This is what makes it radioactive-- its presence on one champion mandates is existence in those that compete against it.

Currently, in order to compensate for low waveclear, champiosn with primarily single target abilities have much lower cooldowns so that they can push waves at a decent pace. My concern is that this might be a requirement, rather than a design choice, given the state of the game. If low waveclear, single target focused damage oriented type champions are to exist in league, they need to offer something that can compete with the snowballing effect of AOE hard pushers, preferably something that adds to the action of the game in the same regards that the hard pusher is enabled by AOE to do via roaming.

For instance, buffing the raw damage of single target damage dealers is out of the question because it would lead to scenarios in which people are blown up before they have a chance to react, which diminishes the interactivity of the game. There is a specific level of damage you can consider "healthy" to have on a single target nuke, but because it is capped by this notion of interactivity and not by a notion of parity, it means that you can have almost as much damage on a multiple target nuke-- and that is exactly what happens, and exactly why there is a discrepancy between champions that are primarily aoe based versus those that are primarily single target based.

However, if taken to an extreme the same problems around lack of interactivity that abusively high single target damage nukes have start to appear for AOE abilities when you stack them with multiple champions-- and that is easy to do because the very implementation of AOE abilities is radioactive. So you see lots of unhealthy deathball wombo.

There are a lot of ways to make single target based damage dealers just as attractive as multiple target damage dealers, but the issue with most solutions is that they make the game less interactive, not more interactive.

The approach of a thousand needles that RIOT is currently using, by amplifying the effectiveness of many items with respect to single target abilities over multiple target abilities, is turning out to be blatantly insufficient.

So my solution comes in 2 parts:

1. Give jungle monsters serious weakness to single target damage and adjust their health and resistances so that they are effectively MUCH tougher versus AOE. (requires about 80% more AOE damage to kill than currently)
2. Put a passive on the jungle items that improves AOE damage versus monsters by around 80% so that junglers are unaffected.

What this does is makes it so that while AOE abilities help you snowball harder if you can utliize your pushing and ganking power, single target abilities help you slow down and even reverse an enemy snowball, if you can utilize your single target damage on contested objectives like jungle camps, buffs, and dragons and barons.

Taking a bunch of AOE might help you get started, but taking a bunch of single target damage would help you steal objectives and finish. This would naturally lead to needing a healthy balance of the two in order to form the most reliable team comp.

This sort of discussion is especially relevant with the impending assassin rework because the balance between AOE pushing power for frequent roaming and high single target damage is a critical piece in the puzzle of how to make a healthy assassin class in league. If these issues aren't resolve before the assassin update, I fear we will have to have a second assassin update once they are.