The Elemental Dragons are Riot Games’ newest change to the dragon in League of Legends, and it brings a host of issues. With four types of dragons spawning in a random rotation, an important facet of League’s macro play is now connected to chance. There are positives to it, but ultimately these changes are going to create a meta focused around team fighting for the Dragons, limiting compositions rather than allowing the new dragons to facilitate various playstyles.
The Dragons
Conceptually, the idea of Elemental Dragons is, for lack of a better term, awesome. Variations to the objective with different rewards does offer variety to LoL’s formula.
The problem with the previous Dragon was the impact of each buff. In order to curtail snowballing, Riot Games didn’t make each buff overwhelmingly strong -- a team with a monopoly on the objective would be too powerful. Some of the stacks, then, had to be useful but not crucial for teams to possess. This resulted in teams either playing to the dragon for the long haul or giving up dragons that weren’t immediately impactful. This created a system where a team that fell behind in dragons weren’t playing a game of catchup, but keep-away to prevent Aspect of the Dragon.
With the new elemental dragons, the linear stacking system is gone in favor of specialized stats that can stack up to three times. The Elder Dragon also creates a definitive point in the game where another large objective available to both teams is contestable while rewarding any accumulated stats. It’s a great twist to the dragon formula that promotes team fights and shorter games, but where it falters is implementation.
The RNG
The flaw in execution is the randomness of spawn. While the respawn timer is the same, it’s impossible to control what kind of dragon spawns. This opens up several possibilities, but it can have adverse effects in a game a team cannot anticipate.
Here’s an example: say a pick composition with low wave clear and range is against a strong siege composition. The first dragon that spawns is an earth dragon, which gives buffs to neutral objective damage and tower damage. The pick comp is not going to be able to make use of the dragon readily: in order to take towers, it either most out rotate or kill the enemy prior to approaching. The earth dragon does not help it accomplish either.
Now, if a composition were able to suddenly take over the game based on what dragon spawned, then the issue lies with the strength of a buff and not the randomness. Riot Games seems to be trying to identify potential problem cases and has issued a change to the ocean dragon in order to create counterplay to its sustain. Ideally, each of the buffs can be applicable to all teams in some way and augment playstyles, not just create a monstrous snowball.
Some of the randomness of dragons has been addressed on release, as Riot Games added a limitation to the type of dragons that spawn; in one game, only three different elemental dragons can spawn, effectively reducing the number of combinations in a single game. While that helps teams piece together what buffs are on the line, there is still a core issue with the random factor, and that is how it will gravitate teams to play around it.
With careful dragon control, a team can set up the Elder Dragon to spawn on time at roughly 35 minutes and vie for its buff that gives true damage and increases the power of previously acquired dragon buffs. This means that there is a near definitive time in the game where a team that stacks dragons can be immensely rewarded. In order to prevent that, the other team will have to opt into fighting over dragons for themselves. This creates an environment where teams are focused on contesting dragons, meaning that they’ll draft compositions designed to fight around the objectives. Rather than rewarded different compositions at various points in the game and enabling it to play to its win conditions, instead there is a gravitation towards fighting over the dragons for the sake of it. This limits, not grows, the metagame. While it may be exciting at first after a season of tower-pushing lane swaps, it will eventually become oversaturated with team fighting.
How can we avoid this outside of nerfing the Elemental Dragons to oblivion? Perhaps give professional teams control over the buffs.
Alternatives
For the changes, let’s operate within the system of the Elemental Dragons. Going back to the old Dragon system is undesirable because of the low priority currently being seen, and changing the dragon to give flat gold like it did prior to Season 5, harms its value in the late game and fuels snowballing.
One idea is to allow the team to choose what buff it gets after it kills the dragon. This gives full control over what stats a composition augments itself with. But implementing it raises more questions: do players vote for a stack? When and where? If a team fight breaks out and the game has to wait for a vote before it gives you the stats that could sway the results of the fight, then there’s a window of risk for a team to take dragon. What if there’s a disagreement between randomly matched teammates that sparks dissent? There’s too many conflicts using this system for it to work in a casual setting.
Another alternative is to include the dragon types in the draft. Once both teams draft their compositions, they each pick two elemental dragons in two 30 second rotations, with an elemental dragon being able to be repeated three times. This gives teams control over what dragons spawn and even customize it to support their comps or counter the enemy’s. Four dragons is a reasonable number for teams to have control of given the Elder Dragon’s spawn time after 35 minutes, and also gives dragons a special value because a team picked it to fulfill its win conditions.
But what happens if teams take dragons quickly, and we get a fifth dragon? Would that be random? How about determining when the dragons spawn? Will those drafted dragons spawn randomly? Then we haven’t solved the problem, but at least we’ve narrowed the possibilities down. Do we structure the spawns based on the sides? If so, then we’re promoting detrimental side advantages.
Conclusion
It is early to be discussing changes to a feature that hasn’t been seen extensively in pro play yet. We can anticipate issues, but until pros play it out we won’t know how drastic of a problem the random Elemental Dragon spawns are. It’s good to conceive of alternatives, though, in case a solution is necessary. Having teams control what types of dragons spawn gets close to stemming the damage a randomized spawn can have on the macro game, but it may not be necessary or warranted. The Elemental Dragons are an exciting addition to the game, but there is reason to worry they will do more harm than good.
Conceptually, the idea of Elemental Dragons is, for lack of a better term, awesome.
Why? I mean, conceptually the idea of Dragon and Baron being capture points rather than smiteable objectives is AWESOME, why are elemental dragons conceptually awesome? The concept of different buffs opening up different teamcomps is good, but having such a buff as a teamfight (a type of comp) objective is not conceptually awesome, its conceptually schizophrenic.
The problem with the previous Dragon was the impact of each buff. In order to curtail snowballing, Riot Games didn’t make each buff overwhelmingly strong -- a team with a monopoly on the objective would be too powerful. Some of the stacks, then, had to be useful but not crucial for teams to possess. This resulted in teams either playing to the dragon for the long haul or giving up dragons that weren’t immediately impactful. This created a system where a team that fell behind in dragons weren’t playing a game of catchup, but keep-away to prevent Aspect of the Dragon.
True!
Some of the randomness of dragons has been addressed on release, as Riot Games added a limitation to the type of dragons that spawn; in one game, only three different elemental dragons can spawn, effectively reducing the number of combinations in a single game.
Eh. Really? Doesn't it increase randomness because if a buff is important to you, there is a chance you will get locked out of it? What is the value of the information after the 3rd (but sometimes never) dragon that there will never be an earth dragon this game?
For the changes, let’s operate within the system of the Elemental Dragons. Going back to the old Dragon system is undesirable because of the low priority currently being seen, and changing the dragon to give flat gold like it did prior to Season 5, harms its value in the late game and fuels snowballing.
Yes, the old dragon is undesirable because it kinda sucked. But the thing that actually made the changes better was making Rift herald spawn later. This eliminated the dragon for herald exchange. In fact, why not totally eliminate herald so that dragon is de-facto the only neutral objective earlygame? That would certainly achieve the goal.
And why is flat gold bad? Fueling snowballing is what the neutral objectives do, old dragon did it, elemental dragons (if you get a decent one) do it, etc. And is it really bad to harm the value of dragon lategame? Defending two neutral objectives is practically impossible with the current ward limitations. Isn't it better for people to know where to allocate their resources? The Dragon-for-Baron trades we see now (whether an old 5th dragon, or new elder) are totally uninteresting and typically just result in a temporarily stalled game. In fact, I wouldn't be upset if Dragon totally despawned at 20 or 25 minutes, essentially eliminating that trade option.
One idea is to allow the team to choose what buff it gets after it kills the dragon.
Teams choosing dragons solves nothing, and its even worse than your worst fears. Champions would have to eventually be balanced around the assumption of said champion having their desired dragon, just like Assassins had to be changed when DFG was eliminated, and Ezreal is balanced around sheen items. If you want an early-midgame teamfight objective you make one, and make it so its universally valuable like gold, damage, hp, etc and you balance teamfight comps, pick comps, poke comps, etc based around their probability of getting said universally valuable resource.
The solution I thought about is, that dragons may randomly switch every lets say two minutes, regardless if they are killed or not. I mean if it is killed than it will respawn in 6, but if its not killed it will switch with another type of drake after 2 minutes.
This way, teams will have to decide do I go for this buff now when I have the opportunity, but we don't really benefit from it in our composition, or should we wait another minute to take different buff, which will however be contested harder?
And on the other side, the weaker team in a given moment will not need to contest a dragon they don't want to give to the enemies, but just postpone long enough for another one to emerge.
And Riot still keeps the randomness, but teams can have an actual control over it, to some extend.
On May 27 2016 17:27 M2 wrote: The solution I thought about is, that dragons may randomly switch every lets say two minutes, regardless if they are killed or not. I mean if it is killed than it will respawn in 6, but if its not killed it will switch with another type of drake after 2 minutes.
This way, teams will have to decide do I go for this buff now when I have the opportunity, but we don't really benefit from it in our composition, or should we wait another minute to take different buff, which will however be contested harder?
And on the other side, the weaker team in a given moment will not need to contest a dragon they don't want to give to the enemies, but just postpone long enough for another one to emerge.
And Riot still keeps the randomness, but teams can have an actual control over it, to some extend.
I still don't like this.
Like randomly you can't do baron because you don't want the seige comp to get Earth drake just based on what the drake switches to right when you make baron call.
another option is riot just states what the dragons are before the game. Then you have to draft in reaction. The issue is its RNG on a comp but if you know spawns then you can adjust. It would be no different to having different maps in sc2 or cs:go
I think a major problem is 2 of the dragons are of extremely questionable worth in a broad set of circumstances. Movement speed out of combat is a complete joke compared to a ton of regen or just straight up more AD/AP. Watching an LCK game and a team got two early cloud dragons while they were behind, which gave them practically nothing of value because teams are already 5v5ing, unless they got a fluke of a good flank due to the microscopic difference in out of combat move speed. And it's not like they got them for free, they contested both dragons and got rewarded with almost nothing. Tower damage and epic monster damage also faces the same problem- it generally only helps the winning team, and disproportionately helps siege comps. You feel obligated to contest it as the other team if you're facing a team that would benefit from it, but it is super questionable how much it helps in the short term.
Personally I wish they would just go back to gold on dragons, all these stupid buffs are hard to keep track of and just make the game feel really random. The last iteration of dragon was bad enough with the different buffs, how the heck are you supposed to figure out how to value any particular dragon as a top laner ahead of time now?
On May 27 2016 20:02 MuddyJam wrote: another option is riot just states what the dragons are before the game. Then you have to draft in reaction. The issue is its RNG on a comp but if you know spawns then you can adjust. It would be no different to having different maps in sc2 or cs:go
I like this idea the most out of all the ones posted so far, but it's still bad: it basically means Riot is forcing you to play a specific comp and closes a lot of doors.
Elemental dragons is just a flawed game design, the RNG makes game more diverse but also adds a factor into the game you can't control no matter how good you are (unless you can take every single dragon with every comp). It makes the game more interesting to watch, but from a balance perspective I'd say it's just a dumb idea.
On May 27 2016 21:20 iCanada wrote: I think you just let the team that slays the dragon pick what buff they get.
Then it real good for everyone, and important every time.
Dragons already snowball pretty hard at times, giving the team that gets one another advantage by getting to choose what buff they want is not a solution imo. Also, even if they don't get it, it can be totally useless for the enemy team (like turret dmg on a pick comp), which is just pushing your agenda again.
People complaining about RNG dragons is a huge peeve of mine. Random dragon spawn is only prejudicial if you've specifically drafted an absurdly specialized team comp that is hugely disproportionately bad with certain dragons. These teamcomps do not exist. This article highlights that with the ridiculous example that a pick comp wouldn't benefit from an Earth dragon. Are you kidding me? A team comp, whose sole purpose is to get a pick to transition to taking objectives, wouldn't benefit from taking those objectives 10-30% faster? Get a pick and now you can take Baron instead of Dragon, or two towers instead of one and a half.
Then the article kicks into paraonia hyperbole mode. Apparently these dragons allow certain teams to "suddenly take over the game based on what dragon spawned" and "create a monstrous snowball".
Look, let's assume all of this ridiculousness is true. Let's assume that it's just aww shucks bad luck that TSM went and drafted a team comp that completely falls apart because Earth dragon and not Cloud dragon spawned first. Maybe -- just maybe -- you shouldn't draft such a shitty team comp. Crazy, I know.
I disagree. I actually believe that LoL overall has a lack of RNG. Gameplay is quite predictable and many ingame moves can be planed ahead and rehearsed multiple times before the game. Typical example would be the laneswaps that would be executed according to a precise schedule for minutes. This limits the need for spontaneous, creative decision making and makes the game less dynamic. The course of the game also becomes more predictable for the viewer which makes things less interesting.
Imo the new dragons help to shake these things up and create a more dynamic decison making process. Which does not mean that everything is fine with them of course, but I like the RNG part per se.
My biggest problem with the current dragons is how there's infernal (combat stats), Ocean which is useful for teamfights (you enter on higher resources than you would otherwise), and then two that have no direct combat effectiveness. Earth/Air simply do not help you lane or teamfight.
Air needs to work at all times (very powerful in that case, might even need a nerf), and mountain should reduce damage taken from turrets/epic monsters by some amount.
Air/Earth do almost nothing for you if you're behind (you get chased down when you lose fights, you can't take objectives because behind), ocean can stem the bleeding, and infernal can help you come back.
One possibility would be to make the dragon spawned a function of the frequency of game actions performed/objectives taken during the respawn time. I.E. a game with a lot of champion kills is more likely to spawn a Fire Dragon, a game with many turret kills is more likely to spawn an Earth Dragon, etc. This would make it so that the dragon spawned is more likely to be suitable for a team's game plan, and also give the possibility for teams to manipulate dragon spawns by pursuing particular objectives. during the downtime.
I feel like this would be better than teams outright choosing the Dragon they want, 1) because creating a non-disruptive way for a team to actually select a dragon buff is a non-trivial UI challenge (particularly in pub games where people won't necessarily agree), and 2) it means that if a team wants a particular dragon type to spawn, there's actual gameplay in making that choice happen, rather than having no actual gameplay attached to the decision itself.
I think seeing what dragons will spawn in what order before the game start would be amazeballs fucking fantastic but since that's not happening I think I'd be happy with just balancing the effects (namely buff air and earth dragons) I consider water and fire drakes to be pretty balanced with each other (though you may disagree with me of course) just make new effects for air and earth and buff them a bit and it'll be ok imo.
Oh thank god for a second there I thought I wasn't allowed to disagree with scip.
out of combat move speed is a boring stat and leads to unfun interactions i.e just avoiding enemy players or super fast annoying ganks.
faster tower and neutral monster killing is also boring it you kill non players faster punishing dumb mistakes even more rather than making the game more fun.
ocean is cool fire is cool
I think people underestimate how strong earth is for doing barons and punishng and shit just because of how boring it is. air is both bad and boring good job riot.
But making all the buffs decent defeats the purpose of not having the Gold-only, or the early iterations of dragon (where the buffs were quite strong), which is that Dragon was made kinda-sucky so you couldn't snowball off it.
On May 28 2016 03:30 Slayer91 wrote: Oh thank god for a second there I thought I wasn't allowed to disagree with scip.
out of combat move speed is a boring stat and leads to unfun interactions i.e just avoiding enemy players or super fast annoying ganks.
faster tower and neutral monster killing is also boring it you kill non players faster punishing dumb mistakes even more rather than making the game more fun.
ocean is cool fire is cool
I think people underestimate how strong earth is for doing barons and punishng and shit just because of how boring it is. air is both bad and boring good job riot.
I mean fire is +8% AD/AP earth is 10% bonus to baron/dragon/towers it's not that big of a difference except fire also applies to enemy champions
EPT
