Critical Chance - The Last Bastion of RNG in LoL

After the 4.10/4.11 Forecast came out recently, CLG's Doublelift () went to Twitter with some criticisms about the upcoming changes to Infinity Edge...

I really hope IE changes never make it live. I don't want to see S4WC million dollar bot lane trades decided on who gets the first IE crit.

I hate RNG and it's even worse when it's an attractive option for early game where snowballing lane is most important

There's nothing wrong with BT vs BoRK build paths right now, it's skill-based and calculated gameplay with no room for luck

I wholeheartedly agree with his sentiment. Riot has been diligent about removing RNG from League, and even curbed many of the abuse cases of Crit (inherent champion crit chance, mastery crit chance, introduced a pseudorandom generator to reduce double crits or long streaks without them).

While I personally don't think randomness is -inherently- bad in games, I think randomness that cannot be reacted to or accounted for prior to their effects is bad. For example, in Pokémon, critical hits are random and instant. They immediately take effect and can have vast game-changing effects that the player on the receiving end cannot have predicted or attempted to avoid. In the instance of Pokémon, a similar effect could be obtained by having a monster knocked "off-balance" whenever the RNG decides a crit has occurred -- but having the next attack be the one that deals double damage / ignores defense boosts (and makes the player's normal priority moves have less priority / guaranteeing Protect/Detect will fail). This gives the player a chance to react to the crit by either swapping in another monster (losing their boosts and taking normal damage...or predicting the type of the move and taking no damage), or answer with a priority move in an attempt to kill the opposing monster before it kills them, or simply taking the hit. It gives options to answer without directly, immediately affecting the state of the game. The player on the receiving end determines just how fucked the RNG gods have made him.

Exposition aside... In League of Legends, a similar option could potentially be explored while maintaining the flavorful semi-randomness of critical hits. In order to do that, critical chance as a stat should be reworked entirely.

Rather than just being a stat that arbitrarily determines whether or not a player deals double (or more) damage, Critical Chance should be replaced with a stat that "generates" as a player fights.

Rather than a Brawler's Glove offering 8% Critical Chance, it would generate ~5-10 "Focus" (or whatever you'd call the stat) per auto attack from the player. Once the player has reached 100 "Focus" their next attack will crit. (This could time out after not attacking for x seconds to prevent starting a battle with a crit...potentially with Ashe's passive allowing her to save "Focus" outside of combat, rather than just build up to a crit.)

This would have the following bonuses:

• Players would know when their own Crit was coming so they could attempt to use it offensively.
• Players would know when an opponent was about to Crit them so they could attempt to force the opponent to burn it on a minion.
• Battles would not start with a critical hit, guaranteeing one player is at a disadvantage from the get-go.
• Consecutive critical hits would not randomly occur unless a player had substantial "Focus" in their build.

(In the case of Statikk Shiv , the item's passive could be reworked to make it so critical hits cause the electric spark, and moving at all generates focus. This would increase the item's synergy with Infinity Edge for carries -and- offer an option to start a battle with a crit.

In Yasuo's case, his passive could generate double the Focus instead of simply doubling his critical chance from items.)

This would increase the interactivity of crits by allowing laners to know when their opponent has a critical hit ready, and choose to dodge them (or mind game them by being one hit short of a crit and then going in to trade for two autos, or using an AA reset mechanic to get their guaranteed crit in, if they were playing a champion like Shyvana or Jax or Renekton.) It also increases the zoning potential and gameplay tension as a player gets near their critical hit in the early game.

Likewise, it would also reduce the randomness of critical hits, while greatly reducing the effect that a player was "screwed over" by a crit occurring, since they are able to detect when a critical hit occurs.

Some potential downsides to this system,

• Downsides? There's nothing bad about knowing more about your opponent's combat strength compared to yours!
• Players may play more passively knowing they're weaker, but that's offset by the aggressive play making potential of knowing you have a crit ready.
• It would take a fairly large overhaul to implement, so it would probably need to be an off-season change.
• Could cause problems with Caitlyn / Headshot interaction in cases where the two didn't line up often.

Anyway... randomized Crit Chance is the last bit of randomness in LoL, and although the "random" flavor of a crit is a big part of its allure... it's possible to keep the random flavor without leaving it as a mechanic entirely up to chance or hurting a player's perspective of a match-up simply because they got crit once out of nowhere. This is my recommendation to a step in the right direction for removing that stigma.