A suggestion to improve the Sweeping Lens line: Give it 2 final versions instead of just 1

Yousonerfed·2/17/2014, 10:29:03 PM·2 votes·739 views

If there's one thing that irks me about Oracle's Lens, its that it feels like too many things were thrown onto it and given too many catches that hinder its use. When you get Oracle's Lens, it's typically to counter stealthed opponents. But whenever you get it, you stop scanning for wards because you can't afford the cooldown, or you might run into said stealth without that Oracle's effect and they'll have a field day.

Conversely, the sweeper effect of Greater Lens never competes with stuff like Sightstone and Teemo mines. You take one ward/mine out, they just plant another one 5-10 seconds later, or have 3 more in the nearby area. Frustrating as all hell.

I would like to propose a change to the Sweeping Lens line: Split its final version into two variants, instead of just one, with the variants specialized between anti-ward/trap, and anti-stealth.

Here is the anti-ward/trap variant:

Grand Lens
Passive: Generates a Sweeper Charge every 60 seconds, and holds a maximum of 2 charges.
Active: Consume one Sweeper Charge to reveal and disable nearby invisible traps and wards for 6 seconds. 1 second cooldown.

This is basically the Greater Lens, but it can store 2 charges for use in quick succession. Good for clearing small minefields or making wider sweeps for wards in tricky areas (like the river entrance to bottom lane). Note that it still doesn't compete with jungles riddled with mines (which you shouldn't enter in the first place) and is still somewhat beaten by Sightstone, but it makes it a lot costlier for your enemy to chuck wards like they're candy. The downside to this variant is that you forfeit the ability to detect stealthed enemy Champions (unless you change trinkets).

The anti-stealth variant is as follows:

Oracle's Lens
Active: Grants the user true sight for 9 seconds. 60 second cooldown.

Basically the Oracle's Lens as it is right now, except you lose the Ward Sweeper effect in exchange for 1 more second of uptime. This also helps indirectly in that you don't need to select a location first to activate the Lens; the current Oracle's Lens can sometimes screw you over if you misclick it. You can still detect stealthed wards and traps, but can't disarm them now and can't safely check a small brush for a mine (like the one outside the Baron pit) without having to face-check it.

Each has its benefits, each has its disadvantages. Both are good for what they're intended to do, instead of having one item that tries to split its function between multiple duties and does it clumsily.

Discussion on this would be nice.

1 Comments

Jamener2/19/2014, 3:17:45 AM2 votes

This is brilliant. A step in the right direction for solving the vision problems with stealth characters.