Dominion Early Trial

Today to my surprise when I logged on Alice and Adam told me that Riot allowed the public to play the new League of Legends game type Dominion for “a short time”, little did I know that this time was only for 2 hours but I was lucky enough to wake up early to play 2 matches of it, and in short, it left me wanting to do it a lot more.

As someone who read very little about Dominion but still enough to know that it was putting the focus on having champions engage in quick and fast battles, I was very surprised at how well Dominion has executed on it. For those that don't know, Dominion shifts the goal away from destroying towers to capturing towers instead, it does keep the 3 lane map scheme to an extent, but for the most part it's 2 groups splitting up at the start and then meeting the enemy's two groups at the middle of a node. With 5 nodes, it's capture and hold basically, however the placement of the towers is somewhat curious for me, instead of having 2 of each side and 1 in the middle or something similar it's basically 4 corners and then one at the top in between two more, I think this somewhat inspires people to focus more of their forces on the top lane instead of the bottom as it gives a bigger lead if you can manage to win the battle that'll ensue.

There are also random buffs placed around the map which are fairly easy to figure out, I personally didn't know buffs would take that form as I didn't read about it, however they're marked with boots and health icons, so someone with even one match-worth of experience will know what both of those indicate, boots being speed, and health being minor healing. Finally there is a third buff in the center of the map called a Storm Shield, there are two of them and they are reserved for their respective teams apparently, what the shield does is that it seems like a simple shield that absorbs a great amount of damage, much larger than most shields certain player characters are able to create. I only got the buff once, and that's the only effect that I saw, however the name Storm Shield almost makes me think that it would provide a offensive benefit as well. So, while the map is very interesting but fairly standard if you've played a lot of video games in the past, it's a huge change on the game play that one expects from League of Legends.

In my first match Alice and I took both of the bottom towers fairly easily against 3 players, I was playing Garen and she was Lux. Right off the bat I noticed that an item that I've become somewhat dependent on was unavailable, that being Doran's Blade, however I just decided to go for boots of speed and try to build up a Phage into Frozen Mallet as soon as possible as that was still around. When we got into combat, actually fighting players was a lot different as well as the overall feeling felt a lot more offensive rather than running away and doing small harassment to the enemy, the three that we fought against made no effort to harass at all until we killed 2 of them and only one was left, I also noticed that killing players affected the overall score which is called the Nexus Health in Dominion, so with controlling more towers affecting the Nexus Health, and killing players also affecting it, the goal of course was to still bring the enemy Nexus down before yours.

Despite having the excellent start, the midgame somewhat became a bit more iffy, while our team wasn't doing poorly by any means, I simply concentrated on offense too much, and there were many times when I did something I shouldn't have, simply because I didn't know about it, such as fighting around a enemy tower. As I was a fairly high level at the time, I didn't think the enemy tower would be that bad and the enemy I was targeting was at low health as it was, so, being used to the damage that normal towers in the classic game mode do, I rushed in of course. To my misfortune and surprise, the towers hit very hard, probably harder than most of all of the towers in the classic mode other than the spawn position towers. Furthermore, I later found out that the proper way to “rush” a node is to have someone channel a capture on the tower to prevent it from firing, at which point you can kill other players while at least one player is channeling without fear of the tower's wrath. Regardless of that however, I simply did not contribute to the team capturing nodes enough and our first game was a loss.

Our second however was much better as I was more knowledgeable about the game mode. We did a 3 top and 2 bottom start, where only one person went bottom against us on their team, so we disposed of them quickly and headed up top where our team was actually winning, in fact by the time I arrived most of the enemy team was dead and I only helped finish off one of the retreating players. The game was pretty one sided with a lot of memorable moments for me, at one point, and this is the point where I figured out how capturing a tower works, I was capturing a tower with an Irelia and a enemy came to try to stop us. She got off the tower and went to intercept them and they were literally fighting like 2 inches away, the fight was pretty even but I felt so bad knowing that I could just turn and kill them but then the tower might have posed a problem even in that short time, so I had to just watch without being able to do anything. She managed to win though, and afterward a enemy player that came to help him showed up, since the capture was done I was able to charge them gleefully.

Another moment that I really liked was when after I killed a enemy I was at pretty low health, but Singed was still around with roughly the same amount of health. Seeing that my ultimate was up, I ran into the bush with the plan to try to burst him down quickly, he came to try to finish me off and I quickly hit decisive strike and Demacian justice which managed to kill him, thankful that it worked I quickly recalled since I didn't want to get into any other fights before healing up. Finally while there were a lot of good awesome moments done by Alice and I, and the team in general, they weren't as funny or interesting as these, including this one. Alice was defending a tower from a Master Yi and was winning, since he was near a wall he tried to escape, however I showed up at that moment and then seeing me, he turned around, but then he also saw Alice there as well, so he was effectively cut off and of course we cut him down.

In short, Dominion is awesome if you're like me and not good at the farming part of classic Defense of the Ancients; it's arguably less strategic but I'm sure there will be parts where both teams group up and fight each other in normal league of legends fashion. In the end though, it's simply replacing minion farming with more PvP combat essentially, and I think that both champions and players that prefer to attack players instead of minions and towers will have a good place with League of Legends now.