What would make LoL amazing?

Talith PA·7/24/2014, 4:22:27 PM·12 votes·1,436 views

Hmm, what would make this game the best? I took some time to think about my concerns with the game and what I'd love to see happen in Season 5.

Talith's Season 5 Wishlist:

Critical Hit (CH) in it's current RNG based implementation completely removed:

  • All items containing it altered.
  • Champions based around having CH are altered to reflect these changes (Marksmen, Light Fighters, etc.)
  • Reworked Critical Hit is focused entirely on enhancing auto-attacks, either on every attack or on conditional triggers.
  • AD / CDR is now the main purchase for ability focused Bruisers, Assassins, some Light Fighters, and Skirmishers (ability focused Marksmen such as Lucian, Jayce, and Ezreal)
  • AS / CH is the main purchase for auto-attack focused Marksmen (Vayne, Caitlyn, etc.) and Light Fighters (Tryn, Yasuo, Fiora, etc.). These champions could (should) also have AS / CH scaling in their abilities.

Overall game length averaging at 20 - 25 minutes, a handful of games pushing as far as 30-35 minutes depending on how even teams are and team compositions (this should be rare). This is similar to Dominion pacing but with SR laning, fighting over neutral objectives, and the eventual base destruction endgame instead of the back and forth point capture gameplay.

Support Champions re-branded as Tacticians:

  • Defined as having abilities geared towards manipulating the flow of combat to either enhance or protect allies, subvert enemies, provide map intelligence, or otherwise contribute to combat in ways that aren't just applying damage.
  • In lane these guys should be fighting even more than Marksmen are, and have more gold to work with in general.
  • To put it bluntly, just learn from Dawngate because Waygate has got Riot beat as far as providing an engaging support experience goes.

Make resource-less abilities the rule, not the exception:

  • All Champions are now primarily cool-down based. Some Champions are gated by energy, fury, heat, ferocity, arcane power, revamped mana, swag, etc. so that their abilities are not ridiculously overbearing during laning. Champion kits changed to reflect this.
  • Items containing mana and mana regeneration removed or redesigned. Blue buff changed.
  • Without the shackles of mana being the rule, laning attrition is primarily health based and should be more active as players are firing more skills. The goal is to make laning more aggressive and engaging.
  • Mages and Tacticians will both want AP and CDR, but Mages focus on more raw damage while Tacticians aim for more utility and some durability.

The primary concerns with the game are:

  • Games take way too long, with a laning phase that is too slow and boring. A lot of people just can't play or commit to ranked because they can't be married to their computer for 45 - 90 minutes.
  • Part of the reason why laning is slow and boring is because mana is suffocating and spending so much gold too remove the problem isn't very fun.
  • Critical Hit being RNG based is just awful. There is no way to justify some fights being determined entirely by who scored a critical hit first instead of being of by player skill or forcing favorable engagements.
  • AD itemization is poor in part because of Critical Hit, but also because you can't really target any changes for a single class of AD Champions. AD/CDR vs AS/CH being more cleanly separated should make balancing Bruisers vs Marksmen easier.
  • "Support" is just a poor, restrictive term. This affects the player conception of what the class is supposed to be doing as well as how they are balanced.

26 Comments

Sir ArmaMalum7/24/2014, 6:21:15 PM5 votes

Removing crit has had some serious discussion as well as some awesome proposals, so you're not alone there.

I do have a big problem with the removal of mana however, Not only is it a staple mechanic for a lot of champs, but it also provides a unique form of gating that reinforces accuracy and punishes missed shots without completely screwing someone over. It allows for spammable low damage spells (Karthus Q, Ryze Q) to still have counterplay. Not to mention the item and ability interactions that benefit directly from mana, completely or partially disjointing them from AP/AD scaling and providing a different build path. That being said Riot has been moving towards this realm of thought (not removal but homogenizing of mana costs, i.e. 100 mana cost on ults) for what I believe is the same general thinking.

Supports re-named as tacticians is kinda unnecessary imho. I see your reasoning, but it's simply a name change and isn't really a gameplay change and because of that I don't really think it's needed. People would still call them supports for quite a while, prime example = ADC to Marksman.

CaptainWednesday7/24/2014, 5:43:28 PM3 votes

What you're saying is, it should become a completely different game.

xWildflower7/24/2014, 5:28:41 PM2 votes

The only thing I like about this is reworking criticals.