The main focus of this week’s patch wasn’t champions or items or lane balance. This week, Riot wanted to address game pacing. Too many games were dragging out long after they had been decided. Minions got buffed, gaining more damage against turrets, higher resistances, and after 20 minutes, each lane spawns an extra cannon minion. It’s hard to say whether it was the right change because Riot also made a mechanic change that directly conflicts with game time reduction: death timer reduction.
Since Tuesdays patch, champions respawn much faster than they used to. The old system had death timers start at 28 seconds and ramp up to 50 by the time players reached 18. Now it starts at a mere 12 seconds and goes up to 50. In short, the system is terrible. While it does let players actually play the game more often, it also wrecks the game’s pushing mechanics. If the games were too long before, they’re nearly eternal now.
I had a game a few days back in which my team was doing very well. I started off 5-0 as Cho’gath, and most of my teammates had similar farms. We had one of those sprawling teamfights that are so common these days, far past our own minion waves but resulting in 3-4 kills. Before we could bring our creeps up to the turret, their team was back up. At the 20 minute mark we aced our opponents by diving their second lane turret. We killed the turret just as the fight started but still took a bit of damage from it. Again, by the time we had pushed up to and started in on the base turret, a couple of the enemy team were back, able to defend the turret without much trouble. In most games, that would be an inhibitor. Things only get worse with characters like Shen and Rammus. They’re back to turret so quickly and turrets hit so much harder that it’s nearly impossible to push before 30 minutes.
The timers aren’t just bad in teamfights; the timers are bad for the lane as well. It used to be the case that winning a lane fight bought you some time to farm minions and hopefully get some work done on the turret. With a 12-18 second death timer, dying is almost no worse than a simple recall. If you just barely won the fight, that free period in which you could get a few more last hits and do some tower work is all but gone. Lanes last longer, which means the laning phase is much longer, which lengthens a game.
Here again, I like the idea Riot had. It’s boring to spend 30 secs at the base at level 2. That was an important mechanic, though. It taught players not to get careless at early levels and it gave enemies the chance to exploit the advantage they had created. I’m really hoping Riot either reverts this soon or comes up with a way to counteract the effects of champions getting back to lane so quickly. Until then, settle in for some long, frustrating games.
