Thoughts On The New Blue And Red Buff

Scosa·Jun 25, 2014·6 votes·598 views

After taking a look at the new blue and red buff, although the design looked great, some aspects just didn't look right. Firstly, blue buff is supposed to be a golem, in my opinion, he shouldn't come nimbly jumping out from the walls.

I'd think it would look more fitting if he was an inanimate rock statue beforehand, and the seemingly large-piece-of-rock start glowing blue and moving on spawn. Perhaps it can show a little effect of all the dust or dirt accumulation falling off the golem. On death, it would lose the light and turn back to an inanimate stone.

Alternatively, if having the inanimate rocks always there clashes with clarity, instead the golem can spawn as an inanimate statue without the blue light, and it can light up when a player approaches. On spawn, the statues can be unearthed from the ground, maybe with a upwards splash of sand and dirt.

As for red buff, it looked fine until I watched the Summoner's Rift Preview video. The design was fine but their argument was that red buff was supposed to look more aggressive and dangerous to make it intuitive for players to estimate its "high" damage output. However, in terms of design concept, I don't see much going on in the Brambleback (new red buff) to make it seem any more offensive than other jungle monsters.

The general look of the monster resembles a turtle, complemented with nature elements (leaves and branches on it's body), which to me, gives an overall tanky/no-damage image to it. In comparison the Elder Lizard, who was designed without cohesion and clarity in mind, easily looks more damage-y than the Brambleback to me. Maybe a skinnier, more predator-looking creature base would be nice (like maybe a giant spider or snake (would fit red buff DoT theme since they're often poisonous), tiger, massive bird, or maybe even intimidating aquatic creatures with the camp being a small pond). Although the Brambleback looks fine, it just didn't seem to fit with what they were going with according to the video.

Just my 2 cents.

tl;dr - Blue buff should be more golem-y and come to life from statue-state instead of nimbly jumping out on spawn. Red buff doesn't look like it has high dps (to me) like they wanted it to, and imo should use a predator animal for its design base (e.g. giant snake) instead of a turtle for that goal.

4 Comments

River BeardJun 25, 20142 votes

Good idea, on the red buff, maybe a fire breathing turtle. Simply because the red buff still does tank very well. But the blue buff... keep it as a golem, that's a good plan. But clarity is still an overarching theme here, especially in the jungle. Making it just by an inanimate stone while dead is not very clarifying.

MackleDogeJun 25, 20141 votes

From the design standpoint I like the visual appearance itself, though I do agree that Red Buff doesn't really scream "DPS buff" to me, but that could just be our interpretation.

The issue I have is the health display on PBE. Can we stop? I get it: "clarity". But the sectioned health bar was enough, you really don't need to display the health on top of the buff again, it isn't going to kill people to click on the buff like usual to keep an eye on the health if it's contested.

Hyrum GraffJun 26, 20141 votes

For once, I agree with you here, though not for the same reason.

I agree because I feel that most of the time, that number is unnecessary clutter - the sectioned bar does enough to make it clear how much hp is left (and if they decide it doesn't, they can further change the design of the hp bar).

MackleDogeJun 26, 20141 votes

Yea, I like the segmented bar as far as appearance and I feel it communicates better the health and strength of the buff or objective, but the numbers are just overkill. It sort of kills the design for me, even if I put aside the personal opinion on having the number available.