My Early Take on the Preseason

So, I've played a few games since the new patch dropped, and I've seen a lot of things that just... bother me.

A while back, Riot said that "snowballing" was bad for the game, and that they were taking measures against it. This entire patch is the complete opposite from this from what I have seen thus far.

This post is completely based around Drake and Baron being too snowbally (although reverting the kill gold back to the full amount right away doesn't hurt when considering a snowball.)

Dragon

• First, Dragon was given more health and more damage along with the rest of the jungle. Given that the Dragon already hurt more than regular camps or buffs, it now hits WAY harder, meaning that even tanky junglers can have issues tanking it without sustain and/or the ranger's upgrade.

• Second, Dragon deals AoE damage. This means 1 of 2 things: -Tricky positioning so only the jungler takes damage (or tricky positioning to swap aggro without multiple people taking damage) or, -The entire team takes damage while trying to do dragon.

In the first case, if the enemy comes, your team is split up, and dedicated to the dragon (because at least 1 person is deep in the pit). In the second case, your team is likely too low to deal with the enemy team should they make an appearance, resulting in either your team getting drake and then getting killed off, or the enemy team getting drake and then killing your team off.

While this may result in "healthier" gameplay "decision making", it leads to the next point.

• Third, when a team manages to gank bot lane, and turn that into a dragon rotation, they get an immediate power boost ON TOP of whatever they gained in the bot lane gank (whether it be a kill, two kills, or making the enemy laners back and miss a lot of cs). You can see how this could lead to snowballing fairly quickly.

Baron

Simply put, the Baron buff is FAR too strong with the boost it gives to minions. I have been in two games on both sides of baron buff (two games having it, two games against it) and, suffice it to say, there was next to no way that the team on the receiving end of the buff could defend against the minion waves pushing in.

Now, when I say that, I'm not saying there were gross snowballs in the baroned teams favor (there was in one game), but that the two teams were at least FAIRLY close (within 5k gold maybe?), and the team on the receiving end couldn't clear the minion waves fast enough to prevent their towers from dropping.

In one case in particular, the team on the receiving end (mine) was actually ahead in gold by a fair amount, and the enemy team snuck baron and proceeded to take 2 towers and an inhib while my team could do almost nothing to stop the minions from pushing (the team deciding to hard engage after the inhib was gone and we won the teamfight hard, but the damage was done).

I'm all for making Baron a better siege tool than just insane regen stats, but the boost it gives minions is a bit much at the moment if you want my opinion.

Closing

That's pretty much it. I like the jungle changes overall, I just feel like Drake and Baron need to be looked at. In all but the highest level of play, they become nothing more than snowball machines just waiting to be taken.