All popular MOBA games currently on the market have their fair share of little good old RNG in their gameplays, but none is truly like League of Legends – where RNG is in every single game, and in the late game phase the game can be deemed won or lost after a roll of a dice, especially with the way critical strikes has been reworked earlier this Season.
Reddit user u/dumnem has been receiving a lot of upvotes on his thread about his thoughts on the mechanics of critical hits on the League of Legends community subreddit. The main point of the thread is to point out the bad things currently in the game due to the fact that this mechanic is heavily RNG dependent, though there is a [perfect example of how this should work inside the game.
Not only just fun, critical strikes are necessary for the game to progress as it benefits many late-game items dependent Champions. Even though this mechanic had functioned well back in the previous seasons, as the game evolved, it has shown its flaws.
- Crit chance in League of Legends doesn’t work like you think it would, u/dumnem called it pseudo-RNG, every time your champion lands an attack and it doesn’t procs, their critical chance will increase. This has been in the game since the original rune system, and the reason the infamous 1% rune was a thing. The developers’ attempt to favor critical strikes in the early stage of the game when your ADC’s critical chance isn’t high.
- This mechanic has been strangely imbalanced for champions who heavily depend on a single or a burst of attacks. There are many perfect examples of this, Gangplank’s barrels are used in the post. Right now the barrels can easily do up to 2,800 damage on a crit with the proper build. Most barrels are going to do between 1200-2000 on a crit. However, this is not the case of builds that play around the ability to explosively one-shot enemies aren’t 100% crit chance builds. They use lower crit chance but very high ad and lethality so when it does crit the ADC’s screen goes colorless.
- Obviously, this is bad for both teams or Gangplank and his target, especially. If the barrels explode but don’t crit, Gangplank will only cause 25% of the damage compared to if it is a crit, because of how much he depends on the mechanic. It only gets more difficult for a Gangplank to land barrels against ADC as he climbs higher on the ranks. Games simply won or lost depends on RNG.
- Another perfect example is Aphelios’s ultimate – Moonlight Vigil. A lot of Aphelios mains agreed, it’s one of the most powerful ADC’s ultimate in the game when it comes to damage dealing, but if it doesn’t strike for double damage it will literally just tickles. Again this feels bad for both sides, maybe he wins the coin flip, and with just ~30% chance he ravages the enemies before him, or maybe he loses it and barely does a thing to the other team’s tanks. Moonlight Vigil deals 120% damage instead of 100% if Aphelios lands a crit, but with Infinite Edge, it deals 155% damage and that’s a lot of damage considering it is an ultimate ability.
- As critical strikes are one of ADC’s best chances dealing with tanks, but when it’s landed on squishies, the problems are the same but on a much larger scale of weirdness. Imagine the tide drastically turned on a lane because fate demands it when an ADC with 1 crit item manages to strike double damage a couple of times in a row on a trade.
But fear not, with 200+ years of experience in developing games Riot Games has saved us and created a not-perfect but far better mechanic, the catch is they applied it on just 1 per 156 Champions in the game – Ashe the Warmother of the Avarosans.
Ashes’s damage output is still gets its fair share of benefits when you buy Critical Strikes based items for her, but in this case, no RNG would change Ashe’s ability to pierce through her enemies’ frontline.
Making crit increases the damage dealt by your attacks by a scaling percentage, similar to ability haste, and if Riot can balance it properly you could even uncap it.
This still gives teams a reliable way to punish enemy team comps without a proper front line. It should be scaled so that at ‘100% chance’ you have the same DPS you do now. RNG is not healthy in a game like League of Legends, it should be about Champions and Items creating advantages that you can use to win and close the game before you get outscaled.
Crit should work like Ashe passive in that you increase the damage you deal by a percentage that is always there, instead of sometimes you doing no damage and other times you doing explosive damage that you have absolutely no control over.
We can’t expect this to happen anytime soon, per se, with worlds just around the corner. But it’s something we can appreciate and be happy to see in future seasons.