Boards›Gameplay

There's a problem with Cooldown Reduction in League of legends:

Big Sexy Himself·8/23/2014, 10:59:41 PM·3 votes·4,333 views

Cooldown reduction is everywhere, and not in a good way. There are 83 end-build items in League of legends (not including elixers / Ichors); Items which are the end of their build path, and can no longer be built into another item. Out of those 83 Items, 30 of them have at least 10% cooldown reduction. That means that 36% of all items in League of Legends have cooldown reduction.

This is a problem due to multiple reasons; 1: The maximum amount of CDR any champion can get is 40% 2: Champions are limited to only 6 items, meaning that in a vacuum case, players will have on average 3-4 items with cooldown reduction attached to them, not including CDR from runes, abilities, buffs or masteries. 3: Items are not the only way to get Cooldown reduction.

Why are these problems? 1: Having a cap on how much cooldown reduction can be had means that once a player obtains the maximum amount of cooldown reduction, any other sources of cooldown reduction a player has will lose their gold efficiency or uniqueness. 2: Once a player reaches 40% CDR, they no longer benefit from any other source of CDR - they become dettered to buying any other items with CDR on them, and abilites / masteries / runes that provide extra CDR lose their value. 3: Because a player can reach well over 20% CDR with runes & masteries at level one, or reach 40% at level 18 solely with runes & masteries.

The main problem I see is that having a hard cap on cooldown reduction eliminates the leftover cooldown reductions value once you reach the max cap. It limits creativity, and is generally un-fun to deal with as a player.

(On a side-note, having 36% of all items have CDR on them frustrates me, because you could easily give those items meaningful or unique abilities to compliment their main uses, instead of just giving them cooldown reduction. It just seems like a bland balance choice)

So, My suggestion would be to replace the hard cap of 40% CDR with a soft-cap 50% CDR - make it so that there's no decay on cooldown reduction before 40%, but after you reach 40%, any leftover CDR is rapidly decayed, but not eliminated, up to 50% CDR. This would make it much better because instead of wasting money on items with CDR when you already have the max amount, the player can decide to get CDR items and not feel like they wasted their gold on a useless stat.

What do you guys think? How do you guys feel about cooldown reduction? Do you guys have any problems with it?

13 Comments

Sunfield8/23/2014, 11:10:51 PM5 votes

See, this is why statistics suck. Most of the 36% items with cdr are support items, which desperately need cdr... because a support cant afford not having max cdr and they need it early. The rest of it is ad and ap cdr itemization, which is impossible to get full cdr with on most champions (unless you want to go with a sub optimal build) and tank itemization which has almost no cdr.

Meep Man8/23/2014, 11:27:37 PM4 votes

I think it would be a better idea to make it a 25-30% soft cap CDR since a some abilities in the game are balanced around the CDR cap, a lot of them being ultimates, few of them but still some being teamfight changing. So I think if it would be changed, make it reduced at be fully applied up to 25-30%, be reduced by 25% after that, and then reduced to/by 50% after 40-45%, then reduced by 75% after 55%, which is where any CDR after that would compeltely and underly break some abilities, but bring a lot of champions back in the meta. Meaning two 20% CDR items still puts you at about 37.5% CDR, which is a healthy place to be. Then any further CDR will have less gold efficiency, but still be worth something. The main worry I have with this is for things such as say... Ryze, Ezreal, and Zilean who can already reduce their ability cool downs by a flat amount. Also people like Leona and Thresh who have massive amounts of crowd control, putting them at a lower cool down would be possibly dangerous. THEN, there is also Kayle and Zilean (again) who have the ability to give their team's carry ultimate rain with low enough CDR with their ultimates. HOWEVER, many champions would massively swing back into the meta from this, such as Vladimir, Fizz, Kennen, Cho'Gath, and Zac. ALSO, it would actually make since to bring Cleanse and Clarity now since you will more than likely run into more crowd control AND use much more mana. It would also bring reason to buy Energy, Energy Regen, Mana, and Mana Regen runes. So...

PROS from the general idea of soft capped CDR

  1. Champions such as Vladimir, Fizz, Kennen, Cho'Gath, and Zac come back into the meta (maybe Teemo but thats NOT a pro)
  2. Casting Resource Runes (Energy, Mana, Mana/Energy Regen, etc.) have purpose
  3. Cleanse and Clarity become useful
  4. No CDR Is Wasted

NEUTRALS from the general idea of soft capped CDR

  1. Possible Massive Meta Shift

CONS from the general idea of soft capped CDR

  1. Champions such as Ryze, Ezreal, Leona, Zilean, Thresh, and Kayle become even stronger (although Zilean isn't noticed much in the current meta)

So the main question is do the pros/neutral outweigh the con/neutral?

67chrome8/24/2014, 8:38:34 AM4 votes

40% to 50% is actually a massive boost to the power cooldown reduction adds.

The most important thing to understand about the way CDR scales is that it actually scales exponentially with itself - REDUCTION is very different from Addition.

I mean, going from 99% CDR to 100% CDR isn't a 1% increase in the speed you get to cast stuff. Rather than a delay, you get to spam a skill infinity with that last 1%.

40% CDR is the equivalent of 66.67% attack speed. For every 100 seconds you'd wait for a cooldown, it's only 60 with 40% CDR. 50% CDR is the equivalent of 100% attack speed. For every 100 seconds you'd wait before, it's only 50 seconds.

Anyways, allowing 50% means Twisted Fate could ult 2 times as fast rather than 1.67 times as fast. Fiddlesticks could spam fear 2 times as fast compared to 1.67 times as fast. Very noticeable power spike going from a cap of 66.67% to 100% increase, the inverse of 40% to 50% reduction.

As for diminishing returns - diminishing returns are lame, nobody wants to do that math in their heads, especially when it hits half of a bonus at an odd angle.

To allow more CDR, what Riot could do is simply make CDR scale like attack speed and set the cap at ~66.67% (65%?). You don't run into 100% means infinity spam, all CDR progresses with an even curve rather than it getting progressively stronger the more you already have, and if URF mode is brought back Riot would get to re-write 80% CDR as +400% cooldown speed, representing 5 times as fast in a larger, more exciting number.

Wheatloaf8/24/2014, 3:48:12 AM4 votes

The soft cap is a possible idea, but if URF mode taught us anything, messing with the cooldown reduction formula could have serious consequences.

Marthian8/24/2014, 4:17:13 AM2 votes

I think CD is fine the way it is.

Khodexus8/24/2014, 6:45:18 AM2 votes

Personally, I'd like to see CDR work on a Logarithmic curve. Basically, if you have two items that both give 10% CDR, your cooldowns are all dropped to '90%' by the first item, then get reduced '10% of 90' by the second item, resulting in 81% cooldown times instead of 80%. 2 items that give 20% would similarly only give you 64% cooldown times instead of 60%. And so on.

This gives you a natural fall off, cause even if you manage to somehow get 80% cooldown reduction, your next 20% cooldown item nets you only 4% more CDR. Each individual instance applies to the new 'difference' rather than adding together.

panther48018/24/2014, 7:00:38 AM2 votes

If you randomly picked 6 full items on average you would only end up with 2 CDR items 6 * 0.36 = 2.18 However, that is ignoring the fact that with rare exception one of your items is a pair of boots. I don't know if you included boots in your count of end game items, but that would only leave 5 items to pick from for CDR items. While you can buy CDR boots the only reason to do that is if you need it to give you 40% CDR. Depending upon how you would have to adjust the item counts for this you still probably end up with a reasonable amount of CDR items in a randomized item set.

Even after adjusting for boots the random item set example still isn't an accurate representation of the state of CDR in the game. When you look at actual builds you would run on champions rarely do you end up with over 40% CDR without being able to switch out one or more CDR items without any real loss. The exception is with Support items, where the items are generally purchased for abilities than pure stats, and even this is uncommon (I'm a support main and I never have any problems with it).

I do think that there are some items that get CDR that don't need it and could use something different to make them stand out. However, in general I don't think there is anything wrong with the state of CDR in the game.

PiRoScOuT8/24/2014, 1:24:48 AM1 votes

I think we are all forgetting who would build CDR the most...Karthus

Angry Monster8/24/2014, 9:34:31 AM1 votes

ah no. You obviously do not understand the game.