Soft Cap for CDR (A Bunch of Ideas)

Preface

I've heard (and felt) a fair amount of frustration over CDR these past few months. The amount of CDR available in the game is almost oppressive now, and it requires a lot of strategic planning to avoid going over the cap on a lot of champions. Now, Im not opposed to strategic planning when it comes to item builds, but when the strategy is to avoid certain stats, I think we have a bit of a problem.

There have always champion and item combos that are less gold efficient than others. Garen doesn't benefit from Triforce's mana. Vayne doesn't benefit from Nashor's Tooth's AP. Rabadon's and Crit chance don't exactly synergize. That's all fine. These items don't increase each other's value like some combos do, but when one item purchase actually reduces the value of another, it just feels terrible from a player perspective. Buying Morellos and Nashor's means that Zhonya's is now less gold efficient than if you bought it on it's own. There are other cases of this in the shop, particularly with unique passives, but I imagine those feel less frustrating to the majority of the player base. At least they do to me.

Idea

My idea is to introduce a soft cap on CDR instead of our current hard cap at 40%. (I will be ignoring the CDR mastery for the purposes of this post because it does it's own thing, and would be quite easily changed to fit whatever system is in place.)

There are infinite models one could use to balance the soft cap, each giving different total amounts of CDR various gold efficiencies. In other words, rather than CDR going from 100% to 0% gold efficiency when you cross the 40% CDR line, it would go from 100% efficiency to a lower % (maybe 0%) more gradually. For the purposes of these models, I am going to employ a new stat, Spell Recovery, to differentiate the the stat purchased from the amount by which your cooldowns are reduced. 1 Spell Recovery costs roughly the same amount as 1% CDR costs in the current system. Rather than purchasing CDR, you purchase Spell recovery and it reduces your cooldowns. (The idea behind this is similar to Lethality vs Armor pen.) Here are a few basic models Riot could use:

Smooth Depreciation Curve - The idea here is that CDR stacks multiplicatively, meaning it is less efficient the more you stack it. Mathematically this would look like 100-100x^(y/10)=c, where x is a number between 0-1 which determines the rate at which gold efficiency will depreciate, y is your Spell Recovery, and c is your effective CDR. For example, if you set x = 0.9, and purchase 10% CDR in the shop with equates to y = 10, we get 100-100*0.9^(10/10)=10, your cooldowns are reduced by 10%. Purchasing 40 Spell Recovery with the same depreciation would yield only 34.39% CDR. Before you say this is a nerf to CDR items, remember that prices can be adjusted to make 40% effective CDR cost the same as it does now. Also, this would allow those who want to purchase even more Spell Recovery to break the CDR cap. Purchaseing 80 Spell recovery would yield 57% CDR. If those numbers sound too broken, remember that x can be adjusted so that the depreciation is faster or slower as necessary. The point of this system is to remove the arbitrary CDR cap and make it a player decision to stop buying CDR when they feel it is no longer efficient. Yes you could get extremely high CDR, but it would not be very efficient both in terms of gold and item slots.

Pros:

• Eliminates artificial/arbitrary CDR breakpoints

• Maximum flexibility for item builds with CDR

• Low-Medium amounts of CDR are cheaper, while high amounts of CDR take longer to reach

• Heavy CDR champions must sacrifice more combat stats to get high CDR (example: if Fizz/Riven want 6 CDR items, they leave no room for Void/Hydra, but it still only yields the same CDR they could currently attain in 3 items)

Cons:

• Potential for excessive CDR builds (especially with high utility spells with CC, mobility, etc.)

• Harder to sense when Spell Recovery is a worth investing in

• Potentially difficult to balance Spell Recovery cost

• CDR is difficult to calculate on the fly

Bracketed Linear Depreciation - This model is much simpler than the one above, but offers a similar effect. Let's say that each point of Spell Recovery between 1-20 grants 1% CDR each. Spell Recovery between 20-40 grant 0.75% CDR. Spell Recovery between 40-60 grant 0.5% CDR. Spell recovery between 60-80 grant 0.25% CDR. Spell recovery past 80 grants no CDR. Morellos would grant 20 Spell Recovery, which, with no other sources of Spell Recovery, would give a total of 20% CDR. However buying another 20 Spell Recovery from Nashor's Tooth, would bring the total to 35%, not 40%. Using the numbers listed above, the natural CDR cap would be 50%, but it would mean purchasing 80 Spell recovery, which is a huge investment, especially when you consider that the last 5% CDR costs as much as the first 20% CDR did. Also, the numbers could be easily adjusted so that the cap returned to 40%, or really any other arbitrary number.

Pros:

• Simple structure, calculating the yield of your next Spell Recovery purchase is easy to learn

• Smooth feeling curve for CDR falloff

• Low-Medium amounts of CDR are cheaper, while high amounts of CDR take longer to reach

• Heavy CDR champions must sacrifice more combat stats to get high CDR (example: if Fizz/Riven want 6 CDR items, they leave no room for Void/Hydra, but it still only yields the same CDR they could currently attain in 3 items)

Cons:

• Potentially difficult to balance Spell Recovery Cost

• Harder to sense when Spell Recovery is a worth investing in

True Soft Cap - All Spell Mastery beyond 40 is reduced to 25% effectiveness. This idea is probably the simplest and slightest change of all the options. The numbers I chose are somewhat arbitrary, but the idea here is that rather than getting no benefit from overcapping CDR, you simply get reduced benefit. That way, having to opt into a 50 Spell Recovery build doesn't feel quite so bad. You aren't getting 50% CDR, but you at least get the extra 2.5% so your gold isn't going completely to waste.

Pros:

• Minimal changes from our current system

• Keeps Spell Recovery at a constant value in the majority of situations rather than a dependent value

Cons:

• Doesn't really resolve the issue, more of a bandaid

• Potential for excessive CDR builds (especially with high utility spells with CC, mobility, etc.)

Individual Champion Spell Recovery Scaling - The idea here would be to make the CDR system similar to the attack speed or health/mana regeneration systems. Give each champion a new stat which determines how much CDR they gain from Spell Recovery. Variances would likely be rather small, some champions might have a 1:1 ratio, some might get 1:1.2 or 1:0.75, and that would likely be as extreme as things got. Most would be in the middle, right around 1:1. High DPS champions would likely have average to below average scalings, while high utility champions like supports would be above the average, but perhaps not. On its own, I don't think this system has much to offer and could potentially introduce a lot of headache for no real reason. It creates a lot of potential for Riot to (intentionally or not) shut down individual or preferential playstyles and shoehorn champions into specific roles. However I believe it is worth mentioning for reasons stated further down.

Pros:

• Allows Riot to tune individual champions in a new way

Cons:

• Potentially restricts creativity in builds and roles

• Adds complexity without adding depth

• Doesn't really resolve the issue, more of a bandaid

Combination - The models above all have weaknesses, and no system would be perfect, but I propose a system that combines the models above. The Smooth Depreciation Curve has the potential to get ridiculous and it would be very hard to find an x that kept all champions balanced, but if each champion had their own x, as in the Individual Champion Scaling model, that could be resolved. Alternatively, perhaps the Bracketed Linear Depreciation is weighted too heavily toward one end of the spectrum or the other, and it would make more sense to employ it as multiple, increasingly harsh soft caps that don't come into play until near 40% like the True Soft Cap. Perhaps the Smooth Depreciation Curve is good up until 50% CDR and then it needs a harsher cap, or maybe the depreciation shouldn't start until 30%. There are a lot of ways you can play around with this, and I certainly hope that Riot has done so. Whether they have or not, they've mentioned nothing about it to the community as far as I am aware, so let's tell them what we want!

Tell me, tell each other, tell Riot what you think would work well, what you fear would crash and burn, what feels good as a player. Remember, the numbers can always be changed, and it is the system that is most important to get right at first. Has Riot already got the best system? What item changes would need to be made in response to your ideal model? Share your thoughts and BE CHARITABLE!! :D

TL;DR: CDR falls off if you buy too much (i.e. when you pass 40%), but what if the drop off was a little smoother?