Thread:Willbachbakal/@comment-1920550-20160422050145/@comment-1330314-20160527005650

There probably might be an issue with some champions getting too tanky too quickly, which contributes somewhat to top lane snowballing as well. Going back to an earlier discusison, I think a solution to all of these issues could be to make health and resists on items percentage amplifiers (and perhaps other stats too), rather than flat amounts, and buff tanky champions' bases accordingly. The end result should be items that provide less raw tankiness to champions meant to be squishy by design, and a tankiness curve that would scale more smoothly as games go on, rather than in instant large chunks.

Regarding idea 1, a Rioter mentioned they'd rather straight-up buff Cloud Drake's effect first before adding new effects, and I support that (imagine how powerful it could be if its bonus were flat-out doubled). Other than that, though, terrain collision removal is a massively powerful and gameplay-changing effect that I don't think would be appropriate for a drake buff, which is meant to provide more of a persistent bonus that adds to a team's options in a more subtle way. An effect like that could potentially be awesome on, say, Ghost, but even then that would warrant a lot of testing to make sure champions like or whatever don't break the game (though that wouldn't be the first time a supposedly game-breaking effect managed to turn out fine in practice, e.g. ).

As for idea 2, I think that might be counter-productive for a number of reasons. First off, which I heavily dislike RNG, here I think unpredictable randomness works because it lets both teams adjust their strategies on the fly and add some subtle variance to their games. Drakes are also meant to be universally interesting to get in some form or another: even if you're a hard-engage comp against a splitpush comp, you're still going to want to capture the Air Drake precisely because it would be more beneficial to the opposing team. I also don't think drakes should influence pre-game decisions, and if they somehow end up influencing games unfairly (which sounds hard to do, since they're a neutral objective), then work should be done to make them fair, rather than force teams to build their strategies around that unfairness. I'd actually be more in favor of stripping the pre-game phase down to its barest essentials, i.e. just champion picks and bans, and either get rid of runes and masteries completely, or have players select them at the very start of the game, along with summoner spells.