Let's Fix: Stealth

 Stealth

Several champions in League of Legends have the ability to stealth. These champions are often very divisive, usually powerful and often pushing the limits of “frustrating to play against”. Champions like Twitch of Shaco can engage and disengage with unmatched ease and can kill quickly after a sudden appearance. This can frustrate summoners at all levels, but is particularly disheartening to new players. Such “feel-bad” moments are necessary to any game with a learning curve, but only in moderation. Else the player may decide it is easier to just quit.

Hello and goodbye, Valakut Ramp

Well-designed games usually contain “release valves” built to counter specific strategies. Rock, Paper, Scissors is the simplest example of this practice: each element is powerful in the right situation, but folds to the proper counter-strategy. Valves are everywhere in Magic: Thrun, the Last Troll counters control decks, Black Sun’s Zenith stops aggro, Hex Parasite kills planeswalkers, and even a lowly Vulshok Refugee can shine in a Red Deck Wins meta. A release valve’s strength is proportional to the power/popularity of its opposite such that it will fade to obscurity if its counter-strategy is weak. These valves prevent a game or metagame from stagnating beneath degenerate strategies. Examine your favorite multiplayer game and you’re sure to find a few.

League of Legends champions counter each other slightly, but with disparities so minor that they only matter at high levels of play. Given proper team composition and equal player-skill any champion can perform passably well in casual play. Where then are the release valves?

What do you need?

The in-game items serve that function. Each player modifies his item build over the course of the game to best combat the enemy team. Armor and magic are the most obvious example: if Ryze racks up several early-game kills, odds are the enemy team will buy a few Null Magic Mantles. Thus, the game self-balances such that no one strategy can dominate. Some valves present an explicit counter, for example buying Quicksilver Sash and Executioner’s Calling to deal with stuns and heals. Others are implicity, such as using Boots of Swiftness to dodge skillshots or chase unusually fast enemies. There are even counters to some valves, like Last Whisper’s % Armor Penetration. Each item presents an inherent opportunity cost, such that a valve is only powerful against the appropriate counter-strategy. Therein lies a great deal of the in-game strategic thought.

Back to stealth. Like any mechanic a suitable release valve must combat stealth. Other games have gone about this either intrinsically or extrinsically. In Halo for example the stealth itself is handicapped to fail when you fire or are fired upon and presents a tell-tale shimmer. Stealth units in Starcraft, on the other hand, can be seen by detector units.

Eye see what you did there

Champions in Summoner’s Rift can counter stealth with either of two items. Oracle’s Elixir grants true sight (i.e. stealth detection) until death, while Vision Wards provide true sight in an area for 3 minutes. The problem is that, unlike the other release valves, both represent a repeated investment for a variable and probabilistic payoff.

Let’s break that down. Each Oracle’s Elixir is a 400 gold lottery ticket. Hopefully, the potion will save my life and/or enable some kills. However, a good stealther will focus on killing me to restore his previous power. Eventually I’ll die, and once again be faced by the same gamble.

At best, Elixir completely shuts down the enemy’s stealth to the point of worthlessness. He can neither engage nor escape as well as he once could, weakening some champions and hobbling others. At worst, I dig myself so far into debt by repeatedly buying Oracle’s. Over the course of the game the Oracle’s effective value could go as high as the 1000’s of gold, or it could dip that far down below zero. Worse, the player can never accurately judge afterwards if his decision was correct.

All items have a variable payoff, but the problem is one of scale. No other counter-strategy costs so much with the possibility that the item will break, forcing you to purchase it again. Even if Chain Vest didn’t help me when Ryze killed me, it sticks around to help me later when I’m attacked by Ashe. Not so with Oracle’s. Even worse, the probable cost varies proportionally to the stealther’s power, since a good stealther gets more kills. Variability and unpredictability have important roles in any game, but should not be used to counter an already stress-inducing and inherently unpredictable strategy.

Luckily the solution is simple: move the Dominion-only items Hextech Sweeper and The Lightbringer to Summoner’s Rift. These items bring stealth in line with every other mechanic by presenting a clear and intuitive counter-strategy with an obvious payoff.

These items improve upon Oracle’s Elixir in so many ways. Oracle’s does not encourage thought and its power is independent of player input. A champion with Oracle’s stumbles upon wards, detects incoming ganks, and chases fleeing enemies automatically. There is no emergent complexity, meaning that it decreases rather than increases the total space of meaningful player-choices. Worse, at full build champions will just buy Elixirs automatically to use up extra gold, automatically countering stealth without any opportunity cost. This is a bad release valve.

Both Dominion items are reactive rather than automatic, allowing the stealther to still engage on an unsuspecting enemy but not to flee so easily. The Sweeper’s forces you to predict enemy movement to be most effective. Players would need to carefully choose ward placement to avoid Sweep, where before any champion wielding the magic eyeball could stumble upon wards anywhere.

These items would have a positive balancing effect on all pre-existing stealth champions and would improve the overall player experience. Oracle’s and Vision Wards could still exist, but they’d serve their original purposes as emergency purchases, rather than as necessary and continuous investments.