Since patch 12.10’s Durability Update went live and beefed up champions across the board, games have naturally gotten longer.
Assassins and mages aren’t able to one-shot squishy champions on the enemy team anymore, which has slowed down the early game considerably. Some of the most picked champions in pro play in the major regions now include Zeri, Gangplank, Azir, and Corki, who scale hard into the late game.
Riot Games is well aware of the meta consequences of the game-changing patch, and have noticed that players are “more comfortable conceding early objectives in order to reach their late game win conditions,” they wrote in the patch notes.
In order to increase the priority of early game objectives, the game developers have increased drake rewards this patch to incentivize players to contest these objectives. All dragon buffs have been boosted across the board by an average of 50%. In the same vein, Rift Herald will grant 200 local gold to the team that killed it.
The attack damage of all elemental drakes, as well as their percent current health damage on attacks have been reduced considerably.
At the same time, their buffed bonuses are huge. Infernal Drake, the most prized on the Rift, now grants six percent bonus attack damage and ability power, up from four percent.
Mountain Drake’s buff will make tanky team compositions particularly hard to kill, because it now gives nine percent bonus armor and magic resist, up from six percent.
But perhaps the most overpowered drake now is Cloud, which grants a whopping seven percent slow resist and out-of-combat move speed. Gone are the days when Cloud Drake and Cloud Soul are ignored. It is the only dragon that had its Soul buffed too, granting 15 percent bonus move speed and 50 percent bonus move speed for six seconds after casting your ultimate.
To balance these buffs, Riot made all dragons tankier, increasing their base health and health growth per level.
While buffs to Cloud Drake are enough to turn Hecarim into a unicorn, and there’s no denying how advantageous Infernal and Mountain Drakes are, their spawn is still random. There’s no way of knowing which drakes will appear on Summoner’s Rift beforehand nor which Soul will be available, and therefore no way of putting together a team composition that benefits the most from them.
Solo queue teams, ranked flex teams, and pro teams will all still need a bit of luck to fully maximize these buffs.
Read the full League of Legends patch 12.14 notes here.
