Early dragons NEED to give global gold
I know the dragon change from global gold to stacking buffs was a long time ago, but I feel like the way the game has evolved around it hasn’t been so good. As a player, the overwhelming majority of solo Q games that I play don’t get to 5 dragons (or even 4, for that matter), and it’s because we don’t coordinate as a team very well to get it stacking early as a priority. It just feels like there’s not enough immediate benefit compared to doing something else on the map (unlike in previous seasons, where I really wanted the team gold and really wanted the opponent to not have the team gold – each early dragon was a big deal). I feel like high level play echoes this as well – I know I’m oversimplifying here, but the huge prevalence of lane-swapping seems to generate in some measure from not having to keep strength botlane to protect dragon 1 (let’s coordinate to do something of more immediate benefit, like 4v0 that tower, say, while they can have an early extra 3 ap or whatever if they want dragon in response… which makes no sense, so they better 4v0 our tower too to keep up). Also, games tended to drag out because dragon as a neutral objective took a good long while to become interesting, and everything from dragon 1-4 didn’t really do anything to give you the tools you need to punish your opponent (and less neutral gold on the map means longer games).
And as a spectator, lane swaps and really slow farm-fest games are kind of awful to watch, and I think Riot knows this and they have made some changes for the worse to try to work around those issues. And to me, weakening towers to make engaging a neutral objective more attractive or lengthening death timers to artificially speed up the game are both just a byproduct of not having enough 5-man neutral objectives that matter early.
So, I feel like dragons 1 and 2 (at least dragon 1 for sure) need to reward global gold again. Maybe the second one grants a little less gold if your opponent doesn’t have one yet or something if snowballing is an issue (I get that the whole point of the dragon change was to avoid snowballing with dragon anyway). I don’t know the specifics; I just feel like it matters to really want those early dragons NOW, and the extra neutral gold on the map would accelerate the game organically. Maybe dragon 3 can give the stat buffs (they really only start mattering a lot mid/late anyway) and/or the movement speed buffs or something. 4th can do whatever, can just leave it as is or give it one of the minor buffs, I don’t think it matters - I mean even if it gave literally 0 benefit other than setting up 5th, it would still be a heavily contested objective.
TL;DR – Riot makes some changes for the worse to try to avoid farm-fests and lane swaps, but these problems might both be a byproduct of early dragons not providing enough immediate benefit. Giving global gold for only dragons 1 and 2 creates a relevant early 5-man objective (and extra gold on map) to challenge both problems organically without having to make unpopular changes to artificially increase the tempo of the game.
