I’ve spent a lot of time writing about the way this game can sometimes induce a lack of skill in the player base. There are a lot of champions who are (or were) just too good for the low skill required to play them. Players see the strength of those champions and flock to them, learning the game at its easiest without picking up on the nuances of League of Legends.
The latest patch addresses a lot of these issues. Some of the easier champions got nerfed (though to be fair, so did some of the harder ones), and some champions got reworked to require a little higher skill ceiling (Udyr comes to mind – I don’t think he’s as bad off as everyone thinks). The most prominent change, though, was to the dragon. Dragon has always been an integral part of the metagame, and it has undergone significant changes when Riot thought it was affecting things too heavily. The change this patch really seems to be about getting teams to the dragon. There’s no more global experience, which means you gotta be right up on top of him to get that extra boost. To compensate for the global XP nerf, dragon got a global gold buff, up from 130g to 240g.
I’m still not sure how this will affect games, but I like the idea. Obviously the purpose is to get teams to travel to dragon in force, but by buffing the gold gain, Riot sort of shot themselves in the leg. If a team fights and wins dragon twice (with the majority of the team at dragon), I think it’s safe to say they’ll have a huge advantage. That much XP and gold for an entire team will launch them ahead of their opponents. I’m all for more focused fighting on the map – it decreases roam, slows down ganking, encourages tight comps – but increasing the benefits to the team that wins the fight means we’ll see serious snowballing in a lot of games. Snowballing is one of the biggest issues for competitive play. This dragon change could make things a lot worse, and we might see a return to the five-man roam squads of months past.
I’m hopeful it won’t happen, but I’m fairly certain we’re in for a frustrating couple weeks of play. While I think Riot can most often be criticized for too many tiny, incremental nudges, when they make big changes, they make huge changes, and often several of them at once. Why not just remove global dragon experience and see what that does?
