Board Thread:Wiki discussions and announcements/@comment-5266525-20140328031051

Having had to write out a lot of champion ability details over the past several months as the info on the Ability Details pages were moved over, and having had to write suitable descriptions for all of the abilities they entailed, it's no surprise that I don't like how the standards about what abilities are what are rather poorly defined even for abilities which ought to have fairly straightforward descriptions.

To that end, I'm proposing abilities be split into the following subsections. This is the part that ought to be debated because I'm personally rather unsure of how flexible or how well-encompassing these are and could use some advice on refining the idea.

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1. Active/Passive

Self-explanatory. This is defined by whether an ability effect requires a user input to trigger, directly or indirectly. If true, then it's an active ability. If false, then it's a passive ability. For example, is purely passive, while  is purely active. is has both passive and active components.

2. Casting Type

This is a fairly minor section and could easily be omitted if necessary. Casting determines how you cast the ability. Normal, smart and smart+self are subsets of this type. These already should be pretty well defined so no need for me to retype it here.

This may not seem like anything that's necessarily a property of abilities but there are a fair number of spells out that are autosmartcast (like and ) and there might be a few abilities out there that can be autocast without any prompting from the player (like  in the  state).

An ability can naturally only have a casting type if it has an active component, so innate abilities obviously do not have this. A handful of basic abilities also do not have a casting type. An ability can have at most as many casting types as there are casts.

As pointless as this category may seem at first, I'm leaving it in for completeness.

3. Targeting

The targeting section is determined by what kind of input is required for an ability to function. It has the subsets of auto, self, single, ground and skillshot.

Auto-targeting requires no input and automatically selects a valid target for you. Auto-targeting might include abilities like and.

Self-targeting requires no input and automatically selects the caster as a valid target. In a sense, all self-targeting abilities are auto-targeted by default, but I felt that it was a common enough targeting type to warrant its own category. Self-targeting might include abilities like and.

Single targeting requires any valid target, like an enemy minion, allied champion or neutral monster, and might include abilities like and.

Ground targeting, as we all know, requires a location to cast, and includes abilities like and.

Skillshot targeting requires a direction. Examples include and.

ALL abilities must have at least one targeting type, even pure passive abilities. Some abilities may have more than one, such as having both a ground-targeted and auto-targeted component.

4. Scope

Scope is determined by the realm or shape the ability affects once it has been triggered. This section is fairly flexible among the categories here but some of the most common scopes include null, circular, conic and oblong.

Null scopes have no shape and only affect the original target hit. Examples include and.

Circular (or point blank) scopes cause abilities to radiate out from the target. Point blank abilities all fall under this scope. Examples include and.

Conic scope abilities affect a cone-shaped area and are the same as before. This scope might include abilities such as and.

Oblong (or linear) scopes affect a rectangular or roughly-rectangular area. Examples include and.

An ability must have at least one scope for each targeting paradigm it has, and some may have more than one per targeting type. For example, has both the circular and oblong scopes (due to having both ground and skill shot targeting), and  has both a circular and a null scope (due to affecting the original target of the arrow differently than those in the splash area).

5. Effect

This category is simply determined by what the ability does. This is the most varied category here and there are far too many possible effects to list but some prominent examples include damage, crowd control, buffs, debuffs, dashes and blinks. Each does what you expect them to.

Info that falls under this category should not be listed in the targeting parameter of an ability details tab.

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So how would an ability be represented under this system? Having an exhaustive list of info about an ability would quickly become very unwieldly for mechanically complex abilities, so I would suggest a baseline convention that if no scope is specified, a scope of null is assumed. Additionally, non-innate abilities are immediately assumed to be pure active unless otherwise stated.

To give some examples, then, of what the fully qualified names of some abilities would be like:

- Steel Tempest is an autosmartcast linear skillshot ability.

- Double Up is a single-targeted ability with a conic auto-targeted component.

- Super Mega Death Rocket! is a point blank skillshot ability.

- Static Field is a point blank self-targeted ability with a passive auto-targeted component.

- Death Sentence is a linear skillshot ability with an autotargeted component.

I'd like all your feedback on this, in particular exceptions which might not fit into any of the above categories and would warrant some fine tuning to accomodate them. Tt's past 3am as I type this up, so I won't be available to add to the discussion for a while after this gets posted but I'll try to keep an eye on it over tomorrow.

Just to answer anyone who asks why we might need such a system as this, it could not only help improve consistency across the wiki but also help make templates which deal with abilities in some way easier to design and utilize. 