User blog comment:Willbachbakal/(Item Concept) Another Look at Vision/@comment-26815373-20151115073813/@comment-1330314-20160226171105

Holy crap, I am ashamed to have taken this long to see this comment. Thank you so much for your kind words.

As for Riot's approach to stealth and stealth detection, I think it has to do with its older approach to counterplay, which used to rely a lot more on counterbuilding and less on organic, moment-to-moment plays and outplays, which is why we have items like, and. It's likely Riot didn't see an issue with stealth when they added it to the game because they assumed players would just use pink wards to counter them, without really assessing how meaningful that sort of gameplay would be.

As for the distinction between stealth champions and traps, I think revealing champions based on proximity could perhaps work in giving targets a heads-up a la, but ultimately I don't think stealth champions need to lose power when ambushing their victims, at least not when doing so skillfully. By contrast, being able to stand dangerously close to a trap long enough to reveal and subsequently destroy it means you know it's there -- you've outplayed the trap and effectively detected it, so it should no longer be undetectable to you. With the release of and his own brand of invisible traps, perhaps a more intuitive method would be to change existing stealth traps to detonate in a similar fashion, visibly winding up for a small moment before detonating.

Audio-specific cues are heavily underused in League, and I think have a ton of potential for subtler plays around vision and detection (we already have certain "contact" sounds for when a spell hits a target, even without direct sight of them). My only real concern is with how sound could be used to convey threat -- a Snitch ward's ping sound might be too good in warning laners of incoming ganks, for example -- but that's likely also because I personally am so ignorant of the vast potential of sound-based play that I can't accurately imagine how nuanced it can be. The same could likely be said for many others, perhaps even designers at Rito, so all the more a reason to test the waters with more audio-related mechanics.

Regarding Clarity specifically, I hate the spell for being a crutch to mana consumption, and thereby one of the many reasons for why mana currently feels like a handicap, unlike pretty much any other resource system (including Heat, which currently punishes spam and poor pacing with repeated 6-second silences). As for vision-based summoner spells, I absolutely believe they can have a role in the vision game. The issue with Clairvoyance, though, was that a) the spell didn't really provide much of an impact when used, unlike pretty much any other summoner spell, and therefore didn't really feel like something you'd reserve a slot for, b) the effect was often too unreliable to guarantee consistent usefulness, when summoner spells are designed to be ultra-reliable, and c) it ended up being surpassed in pretty much every way by the blue trinket line, and even before that felt somewhat inferior to standard wards, just like the blue trinket itself before it got reworked. If we are to have vision-based summoner spells, they need to feel impactful and consistent enough with each use to sacrifice, say, or, and they need to offer a bonus no other item can compete with. If you had, say, an /-type ability that revealed the entire map for a few seconds, you'd have a unique, powerful and at least slightly more) consistent vision-based spell, one that could likely enable new and interesting gameplay. There are perhaps issues with a spell like that too, though, such as deciding when to use it (which situations warrant "good" use of an omni-vision spell? Which ones don't?) and the power it may grant (high-level teams could end up completely unraveling the opposing team's strategy with a button press, and stacking the spell could end up providing too much security), so there's a lot more to be discussed here, but the idea of itself of vision-based summoners is a fine one, imo.