Looking At the Gold Efficiency of the Patch 4.21 Dragon

By Kennan French

With Riot increasing their “strategic diversity” in terms of objective control, dragon now gives non-monetary rewards instead of the global gold it gave in Season 4. The most widely-appreciated of these rewards is the bonus percentage AD and AP. However, the balance team at Riot decided that the 8% bonus given in Patch 4.20 was a bit overtuned, so it has been changed to 6% in 4.21. For those not familiar with gold efficiency, it is the idea that champion stats have a certain gold value based on the basic items for that stat. In other words, it is a ratio of your benefit to your cost of buying an item.

This idea of gold efficiency can be extended to the dragon changes—a team can be thought of as forgoing the old global gold of the dragon (190 gold for each team member when dragon is level 7) to “buy” this 6% increase in AD and AP. For example, if someone got 190 gold worth of stats from the dragon, then they could be said to have 100% gold efficiency compared to the old dragon. Note that this is a sort of “scaling” gold efficiency, since we’re comparing a percentage AD/AP bonus (which increases over time) to the constant 190 gold a player would have received in Patch 4.19.

So let’s get into the numbers. An average time for first dragon (as computed by random games from various solo queue elos, IEM, and OGN) is something like 10-13 minutes. On Patch 4.20, the dragon bonuses would have been (roughly) as follows:

AP Champions
Role	Approximate AP@10	Bonus AP	Worth of Bonus AP	Gold Efficiency@10
AP laner/jungler	80	6.4	139 gold	73%
Support	Negligible        ------------------------------------------------------>

AD Champions
Role	Approximate AD@10	Bonus AD	Worth of Bonus AD	Gold Efficiency@10
AD solo laner	120	9.6	346 gold	182%
ADC	100	8	288 gold	152%
AD jungler	105	8.6	310 gold	163%

These approximate AD/AP values are estimates based on the base values of popular champions, common rune and mastery pages, and a few “normal” builds for those popular champions.

On 4.21, here are those same values with the 6% bonuses:

AP Champions
Role	Approximate AP@10	Bonus AP	Worth of Bonus AP	Gold Efficiency@10
AP laner/jungler	80	4.8	104 gold	55%
Support	Negligible        ------------------------------------------------------>

AD Champions
Role	Approximate AD@10	Bonus AD	Worth of Bonus AD	Gold Efficiency@10
AD solo laner	120	7.2	260 gold	137%
ADC	100	6	216 gold	114%
AD jungler	105	6.3	227 gold	119%

It is also important to understand the changes to the vales from 4.20 to 4.21, so here they are:

Role	Change in Bonus Value@10
AP laner/jungler	Lost 35 gold
Support	Negligible
AD solo laner	Lost 86 gold
ADC	Lost 72 gold
AD jungler	Lost 83 gold

This effectively means that champions which scale with AP were hit less by the 4.21 dragon changes—buying AP is cheaper than buying AD, after all. The dragon buff is still typically “gold efficient” on AD champions, but is just barely halfway to being gold efficient on AP champions (until they get 146 AP, when they “break even” compared to the old rewards). It is worth noting that since AP champions tend to amass much more AP later on in the game than AD champions buy AD, the scaling gold efficiency is better for an AP champion. An Orianna with 650 AP, for example, gets 39 AP, which is around 850 gold. That makes it 447% efficient, whereas a Zed with 330 AD gets only 375% gold efficiency.

To conclude, dragon in Patch 4.21 still benefits AD champions more than AP ones in the early game, and this reverses as the game goes on. Until AP champions get enough AP to break even with the old dragon gold, they aren’t too happy about the changes; once they hit 146 AP, though, they think maybe it’s not so bad after all.

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 By Kennan French