Zoe RNG vs Dragon/Plant RNG

Glory ln Death·1/12/2018, 5:25:06 PM·1 votes·255 views

Yesterday, I was having a discussion about RNG elements in the game - plant spawn timers, specifically - and it got me thinking about elemental dragons and Zoe, and why their RNG is viewed so differently by players. Most players hate Zoe's RNG W bubbles, while no one really cares about plant spawns and random dragons are viewed either neutrally or slightly positively.

So, why are they so different from Zoe? Thinking about it, I can see two reasons, and a possible way to incorporate those into Zoe's design to make her RNG aspect (if nothing else) feel better to play against.

  1. Plants and dragons are available to be used by both teams - either team can use them, even plants in the enemy jungle, while Zoe's W bubbles can only be used by her. An Infernal Drake might be better for the enemy team comp than your own, but you can still take it and use it. But Zoe's bubbles can only be used by her, so the RNG always hurts the other player, and cannot help them.

  2. Plant Spawns and Elemental Drakes are announced well in advance. Plant seeds appear 60 seconds before the plant is useable, so you have a decent warning, rather than them just popping out of thin air. You know which plant it is, where it is spawning, and approximately when it will spawn. The type of Elemental Dragon is visible both on the pit walls and in the scoreboard as soon as the current dragon is killed, giving 6 minutes to prepare for it. However, Zoe's W minion bubbles don't give you that info - you know the minion will drop a bubble, but you have no idea what's in it.

I don't think it would be good or easy to incorporate the first point into Zoe's W, and it would probably feel like a mini-game the enemy was forced to play (step on the bubble before Zoe to get a speed boost/heal/empowered auto and deny her the bubble, or something).

However, the second point could definitely be applied to her W. Currently, we can see which minions will give Zoe a random bubble by a little bubble icon over their head. But that's all we know. What will it give her? Heal? TP? Protobelt? We have to fight to deny Zoe every single bubble just in case it's something she can use right then to get some huge advantage, and we can't react to it until we see what it is.

What if, instead of a blank bubble over the minion, it showed what it would give? That way, it's still random, but we can anticipate what will happen if Zoe gets it. We might see a Protobelt coming and say, "Heck no, I don't want her getting that!" and try to push her out of lane before she can get it or set the wave up so it's difficult for her to kill the minion/grab the bubble. Or, maybe it's something she can't really use at the moment, or that won't give her a ton of power, like Smite, so you don't feel like you need to worry about it.

This change would make the random minion bubbles feel much better to play against since you can have a bit of time to plan and prepare, rather than having to immediately react as soon as the minion dies. It also gives more power to the enemy than to Zoe, since they get an earlier warning by having vision of their minion when it spawns.

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