About Heal

ILoveTiramisu·May 6, 2014·2 votes·1,501 views

I know Riot is buffing all summoner spell, but I don't really understand why Heal gives you a moviment speed. (Better put it on Flash, right?)

7 Comments

RiotLtRandolphMay 6, 20143 votes

I like Rhyto's "lore" explanation for this.

As far as gameplay, I wasn't there when the decision was made, but I would guess that in order for Heal to have "enough power", it either needs to do a really big heal, or do a smaller heal and have some secondary effect. The advantage to putting some of its power in a secondary effect, it is helps keep it from being mandatory for traditional "stand and fight" throwdowns. In this way, the 4 main "fight spells" can have separate roles. Again, I'm not the authority on this, but as a player I interpret those like so:

Exhaust: There is a single overbearing threat on the enemy team, so shut them down.

Ignite: You're pursuing a kill and want to make sure you get it (particularly with the new vision changes).

Heal: You need to get yourself out of a bad situation.

Barrier: You specifically need to protect yourself.

I would argue that a Heal without a secondary effect would be either strictly better or strictly worse than Barrier.

MackleDogeMay 6, 20146 votes

As it stands Heal is already strictly better than Barrier. Heal is more versatile, it's numerically stronger after level 3, and it has more utility. I'm not saying this is bad, but let's just call a spade a spade. From everything I'm seeing when I play, when I watch my friends play, when I watch spectate live, and when I watch people stream and the LCS, I see Heal and Heal only. I honestly can't remember the last time I saw Barrier in a high MMR game and even Exhaust is extremely rare.

In my opinion, if the purpose behind these changes was to encourage alternate summoner use and increase the amount of variety we see, the changes failed. Instead we are just seeing a drastic shift in the other direction.

Hyrum GraffMay 7, 20142 votes

I disagree. And the reason is because Riot isn't done with summoner spells. For example, Morello has stated that Barrier is up for a rework as well, and his currently favored crazy idea (at time of posting, which was several weeks ago) was to have barrier act as a shorter Kayle ult (blocks all incoming damage for 1.5 seconds)

Furthermore, It hasn't been officially announced, but I suspect their goal with summoner spell updates is to bring every summoner up to the "flash bar", like they announced they wanted to buff several top laners up to the renekton bar. This has already been accomplished to some extent - we've seen heal/tele mundos in top lane in the LCS.

Why not just nerf flash? Because they've done that a LOT already (longer cooldown, shorter range) and doing it any more would make it useless.

Anyway, so it's true, right now heal is VERY strong. But that's only because other summoners haven't been updated yet.

MackleDogeMay 7, 20141 votes

Well, that actually isn't isn't disagreeing with me at all. Like I said, it depends on what they were attempting to accomplish with the changes they've made so far. Just because you have a long term goal with your changes doesn't mean you shouldn't be responsible about the short term impact that the changes will have as well. Personally, I don't really see them being able to make the other summoners reach the "flash bar" as you put it without making them drastically overpowering in certain situations. What makes flash such a strong and consistently used summoner spell is that it has a flat usage line for all champions. No amount of healing/movement speed buff, no amount of damage canceling is going to compare to an instant blink/wall jump/escape without being increased in numerical values to the point where there are consistent abuse cases and overwhelming factors to them. In my opinion, there really isn't anything wrong with having flash be a consistent summoner, we see a lot of great plays with flash, it allows for both aggressive and defensive plays, and there are still skill aspects to its usage.

This isn't to say I'm denying more changes, I'm sure there will be. And I won't explicitly say those changes will be bad or not make a good impact, I just don't personally see a lot of potential to accomplish a truly varied and diversified summoner usage without considerable damage done to flash or a series of far too numerically strong buffs to other summoners.

RhytoMay 6, 20142 votes

Well, if you think about it from a point of view, being healed/rejuvenated would give you a feeling of refreshment in which allows the speed to be applied briefly. Perhaps that's the concept behind the movement speed buffs ^_^

AbiwonKenabiMay 6, 20142 votes

Flash is already THE most used summoner spell in the game, bar none. It doesn't need a buff. Besides, if you have the distortion boots enchantment item 3258 it grants movement speed after the cast just like what you talked about. Not a ton, but I still like getting it on Annie support.