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.
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