Thoughts On The New Blue And Red Buff

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.