Air Dragon

Valexfor·5/28/2016, 9:12:49 PM·1 votes·469 views

Since I'm not entirely sure about where to put this I'll put it here and i'll ask for forgiveness in case it's the wrong board, my reasoning for posting it here is that Air Dragon is already a part of the game so it's not a new concept. With that said let's get started with the actual post.

Now let's think about what each dragon is good at:

  • Fire Dragon: Gives 8/16/24% AP and AD. Extra AP and AD are good no matter what: every champ, team, strategy can use this dragon efficiently;
  • Ocean Dragon: Gives 4/8/12% missing mana/8s and missing healt/8s while out of combat. This dragon is extremely good on heavy poke champs, it gives them enough sustain to mantain theyr poke, but it's also extremely good for skirmishes and team built around them since the mana and health regen will heal them back after every trade (especially if stacked) enabling such teams to stay always high on both mana and hp so that they can constantly force fights on the enemy team;
  • Mountain Dragon: gives 10/20/30% additional True damage to towers and Epic monsters. This one is a little weak on most champs, but he's INSANE on strong splitpushers and on control junglers who don't really need the AD/AP from Fire dragon (they can use it, but usually as a split pusher/control jungler you don't want to fight too much, you prefer objectives) but can really use the true damage (most splitpushers are as based anyway so it's better to get 10% extra true damage than some extra ad/ap). It's also good to offset the damage reduction from obtaning more tha one dragon;
  • Air (Cloud) Dragon: gives 15/30/45 MS out of combat. Who likes this guy? Pretty much no one, really. While it might be a good help for roaming and setting/escaping (only if you didn't get caught already) ganks, this dragon is suboptimal as it is right now and the only champs who can see it as a strong option are: Volibear, Hecarim, Rammus and Udyr who already rely heavily on MS to gank, and even then it's only good to start it, it won't help to follow the enemy after the gank.

As we can see the first 3 Dragons all shine in at least one aspect of the game (Fire is a strong jack of all trades, always good; Ocean is a strong poke/skirmish buff; Mountain is a strong control buff) but, as I said before, Cloud Dragon is strong only on 4 champions (I might have forgot 2-3 other champs, but the game has 131 champions and at least 125 of them don't find it appealing), it's not a bad thing that something is appealing only to a small niche of champs, but this is a dragon buff, it's not ok for it to be a "niche" buff who only 5-6 champs can use. So what's my suggestion? I would suggest the dragon to only expire in combat with champions and also boost nearby ally minions MS by the same amount (so 15/30/45). What would these changes do? Let's start by saying that the only champs who like to move around the map are roamers and splitpushers and, while roamers don't care about minions (they don't have to face them while roaming), splitpushers are constantly fighting them so, while this dragon is theoretically incredibly good on them since it enables them to escape more easily from the enemy team and move faster toward theyr objective (towers), they can't actually get the bonus MS since they are fighting minions constantly, these changes will make this dragon appealing on splitpushers, enabling them to both reach towers faster and to be more safe while doing theyr job and also, by giving nearby minions more ms, this would help lessen a bit the frustration of having to wait for your minions while pushing since they will be albe to keep up with you better. In the ened this would result into the Could Dragon buff becoming a pushing centered buff especially if combined with some Mountain dragons. All in all these changes are only one way of buffin this dragon, maybe it's the worst, maybe the best or maybe neither but I still wanted to share my suggestion.

Also (a bit of an off-topic) I think that it's too hard to stack dragons right now: even during an urf with malzahar (the fastes champ at bringing down the dragon at level 1) you can't take more than 6 dragons (the 7th will be an elder dragon since the first dragon spawns at 2:30) so I think that something should be done about this since most dragons are effective only if stacked (only the fire one is strong even with one stack) so I think that dragons spawn shouldn't be totally random, but should prioritize already slain elemental dragons (so if first dragon was a fire one, the next dragons will have a higher chance of being fire dragons as well). Making dragon spawn faster would also be a good way of looking at it (so that you can kill more dragons) and, unlike the other suggestion, would bring more dragon diversity. Both suggestions have pro and cons but, like I already said before, these are just my opinions and I'm perfectly aware that there will be people who will disagree with me and will have all kind of different opinions. Thanks for reading and have a nice continuation of whatever you are doing.

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