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The real culprit for the so called "damage", "Crowd control" and "mobility" creep

Euriko·9/14/2017, 7:55:04 PM·25 votes·2,859 views

A lot of individuals on this board have stated that there is an overabundance of certain things in League of Legends. I've seen complaints about there being too much crowd control, causing certain classes, mostly immobile melee ones, to feel like a chore to play due to them being pinned down without a lot they can do to circumvent that issue.

Additionally there have been some complaint about excessive damage and mobility, both of which are also direct results of the same thing causing the so called "CC creep".

And that thing is a certain stat called "Cooldown reduction."

Cooldown reduction in previous seasons was a stat that people actively opted into on certain classes, or rather specific champions, requiring certain item builds and rune setups that would allow them to hit the cooldown reduction cap somwhere down the line. There were specific high-budget items that allowed champions to get 40% cdr, with Frozen heart having been one of them.

Both the Iceborn gauntlet and the Trinity force did not have 20%, with Trinity force even having none of it in its previous iterations. Whoever wanted to get cooldown reduction had to plan ahead and know which items to pick so that they would amass enough of the stat to hit the cap.

But this is no longer the case nowadays. There has been an influx of a lot new CDR items, usually introduced during Class Updates.¨ The biggest offenders being item 3071 item 3165 and most Tank items, as they already provide a bulk of CDR in one purchase, effectively making people able to pick up a second or third item to reach the cap. And that's without the tradeoff of less damage, durability or a lack of certain other stats.

Core items have been given a lot of CDR with a lot of staple items having smaller amounts of 10% per purchase that allows players to hit a 40% cdr cap relatively early into the game.

But is that necessarily a bad thing?

In my opinion? Yes, for a few reasons I shall put into perspective.

Prior to this influx of new CDR options a lot of champion's spells were balanced around having a high cooldown that meant that they had to be used sparingly or only in certain situations so that the spell would not go to waste. This layer of strategic thinking was removed as a lot of spells have a rather high uptime due to excessive cooldown reduction numbers.

In previous seasons hard CC was usually just a one time thing. One high moment that would turn the tides of a fight but nowadays the same spell can be used more than once during a fight, meaning there's a lot of additional crowd control flying around in a messy teamfight.

Additionally damaging abilities and mobility have also been affected by this change, meaning that damage and mobility is higher. A lot of mages in particular itemize Morellonomicon, already providing them with 20% cdr and making them able to use their spells several times more often than in older version of League of Legends.

Is there a way to combat this influx of CDR that is warping the battlefield of Summoner's rift?

Frankly? Yes, indeed.

And it's rather easy. It would simply require core items to have less Cooldown reduction on them and force champions to consciously invest in this particular stat without getting it passively through their core itemization.

Morellonomicon, Black cleaver, Iceborn Gauntlet and Trinity force in particular need some changes to their stats while other CDR items should have their niche of being geared towards higher spell uptime made more pronounced.

As a closing remark: Yes, cooldown reduction is a fun stat to have as it allows you to sling more spells at the opposition and overall get to use your champion's abilities more often without having to keep them for certain threats. But it does lead to the game losing a lot of its strategic thinking when hard crowd control is so readily available and certain damaging abilities become too overwhelming.

But reducing the builds that lead to 40 or 45% cooldown reduction would benefit this game heavily as it would turn down the overabundance of Crowd control and damage that many people seem to have a problem with while making the experience of playing League of Legends overall more enjoyable.

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58 Comments

WoonStruck9/14/2017, 8:19:54 PM32 votes

Actually, its the champion designs and reworks as of late.

Most CC is knock-ups, not even affected by tenacity.

Slows are tacked onto everything.

Mobility is thrown on almost every new kit.

CDR is a very small part of CC/mobility creep, considering most people aimed for 40% CDR anyway.

CDR contributes to damage creep much more heavily than CC/mobility, since people can itemize more damage in lieu of CDR-specific items.

While I do agree that itemization should be changed to make CDR a trade-off, as opposed to free on items, don't get the contributing factors of the current game-state mixed up.

Ahristocats9/14/2017, 8:31:06 PM9 votes

Galio vgu, let's make a low cc tank into a heavy cc tank with knock up Sejuani rework, let's rework a tank into a cancerous pile of cc

apply the same logic to: XinZhao Zac Gragas Ivern Ornn no wonder the game is shit when you rework everyone into cc bot, and release champions making you unable to move

also gragas can literally make you unable to move with 40% cdr it's hilarious

The Yetii Rider9/15/2017, 12:22:06 AM3 votes

What would actually happen with less CDR in the game: Banshees Veil becomes much deadlier because it's more of a cost to break the shield. Morello is also less important as a Rush so the champions who don't have mana issues rush Veil early and use it to bully with impunity and all-in easily.

Champions who need to build mana quickly fall out of favor as Morellonomicon is far worse than Banshees Veil. Mid lane becomes dominated by Ahri, LeBlanc, Katarina and Fizz.

Team fights come around and the tanks initiate. Amumu throws his Bandage Toss!

Enemy team flashes away. Now Amumu is dead in the water for 9 seconds.

Enemy team engages and kills the carry in those 9 seconds. Nami is only able to cast each of her 10-14 CD utility abilities once before her team is wiped out.

And fun was had. That's why we play this game, to tap a few keys once each and then stare at a screen until it turns grey.

Kloqdq9/15/2017, 1:05:44 PM3 votes

The way I'd solve the problem with CC is two fold. 1, make tenacity affect everything and be more meaningful. Knock-ups should not ever be excluded from CC and if a team if 5 knock-ups what do you do? Just give up because the one stat meant to beat CC is worthless.

The second way I'd do it is by applying the logic from Paladins where every instance of CC adds to this stack of CC. Whenever you are hit with CC directly after one instance of it, the new CC will be less effective. Basically if you have 3 stuns that last 2 seconds each it would work like;

First stun - 2 seconds Second stun - 1.75 seconds Third stun - 1.5 seconds

As an example. This is to prevent heavy CC stacking at the end of the day and league has probably the most instances of hard CC in any game I've played so this is just a really good solution to being CC locked by a lone Sejunai for about 4 whole seconds.

Another solution is make CDR more niche again. CDR is way to build into everything nowadays and if a person wants to build towards a stat, there should be a trade off. CDR doesn't. Simple as that. So let's solve that and make CDR less of a glut stat and more of a niche, you need to build towards stat.

Other things like dashes and mobility as well as damage are rooted in a lot of different things but I think CDR would heavily solve some of those issues while the CC fixes help out a lot of classes that are struggling.

NineTailedMystic9/14/2017, 10:29:04 PM3 votes

Morello has given 20% CDR for a long time though. It's only when they threw CDR on every other AP item it became an issue.

Sasogwa9/15/2017, 3:13:31 PM3 votes

Mmmh in my opinion it's more linked to kit and item overspecialization. Tanks now all have some %health damage integrated in their kits, whereas it used to be only available on a select few (Amumu?) Juggs have BC which has insane synergy with a lot of kits, they also had base stats reworked to go well with item 3053 etc. For the most part they also have %health damage or %armor pen, to favourise fighting the frontline. ADC itemization basically offers a solution for everything. AD menace? item 3026 . AP menace? item 3156 . CC menace? item 3139 Support itemization ... Should we even talk about it? Amazing items like item 3504 item 3190 item 3107 Assassin itemization .. Great lethality options item 3147 item 3142 item 3814 Mages.. are maybe the least beneficial of this but there are still good options.

Everyone has the items they want and their kit has been reworked to have insane synergies.

Compare to a few years ago, where the itemization was way less specialized, the kits had kinda random scalings, a bit of AD ratios, AP ratios, rarely health ratios or %health as this was extremely powerful. The most broken ratios/scalings were maybe Kog'maw (%health magic on hit) and Vayne (% health true damage) aaand that's it. And actually put them as great lategame carries because they had access to this kind of broken stat.

Funnily enough, the fact people didn't have as much %health things and more like, base damage, made ADC's easily oneshot by anyone and kinda forced to take real defensive items like old GA/old banshees (purely defensive items at that time). Assassin itemization was like.. Youmuu's then brutalizer then well idk what to build... Bloodthirster? lol

LordGeovanni9/16/2017, 4:32:32 AM1 votes

last i checked adcs got 30% cdr on an item and they avoid it like the plague but on the other hand adcs base spells have been getting shorter for the past 2 years. thing is mage spells have been getting shorter cooldowns too and they get more cdr. most fighter spells went up or went down but got nerfed in damage same with tanks and their spells having large delays on the action where the cooldown doesnt start until the entire spell is over unlike how mages and adcs get cooldown starting on cast.

Ðelofasht9/15/2017, 2:25:44 PM1 votes

Damage creep = really just Crit and a few new items bypassing too much armor sometimes. Rework Crit, reduce effectiveness of Duskblade (internal cooldown on the damage application).

Mobility creep = match mobility of immobile champs with those of mobile ones through itemization that only works if you did not blink or dash recently. Rather than reduce mobility make it available to everyone.

Crowd Control Creep = displacements are in too many kits, solve with skill expression itemization that allows players to ignore it for a short duration on a relatively short cooldown. Marksmen already get a cleanse item and assassins have EoN, mages have Zhonyas, Tanks really do not have an item, neither do fighters (Mercurial/EoN is not very good on most of them).

CDR does not feel like the culprit to me, but being able to go over cap has been an issue. CDR allows some champions to actually combo somewhat frequently, and being available to all keeps it pretty fair for everyone. The issue is when players cannot use abilities or they simply are not needed because right clicking fully outscales abilities.