I actually think that RoA would be perfectly balanced in Dominion even if the stacking aspect were completely removed and it gained its full power the moment you bought it.

If you think about it, RoA is basically a Rylais but trades the awesome slowing passive for a bit of extra health and a lot of mana.

Even if it gave full stats from the moment you bought it, most mages are still going to prefer Rylais.

Might be a bit too strong on Ryze imo.

I like the stacking aspect because it allows the item to become more valuable over time. If everything were to just be instant on it riot would probably trade the saved time for full power for increased gold cost to prevent a huge amount of hp/mana on a champ so early

Back to the top this goes =)

Working on something else right now, as this has been off my radar. I haven't found Tear to be problematic (some champs can charge, others can't... not too big a deal), but RoA could probably use a buff on the map, yeah.

Maybe a buff to Archangel's charging? I don't know about Manamune since I don't play champs that buy Manamune, but it feels like AA could use a buff to charging.

That is the reason it is problematic........

Hmm, played around with it and starting tear and constantly spamming Q on cooldown with other spells mixed in when in combat, it takes Ezreal 11:30 to fill a tear. That is half a game and you sacrifice all combat stats just to be able to start filling a tear on a spell spamming champion.

That really needs to cut down to about 7-8 minutes to fill a tear for it to ever be considered a viable item on anything but Ryze.

This really is a problem. Champions like Ryze have a difficult time with the lack of minions, but charging a tear is vital for his build. It's the same problem as champions like Thresh have in their passives being affected by the lack of farming. It also punishes many champions for going top, since they become unable to stack, despite what help their presence there can provide for the team.

My suggestion, if possible, would be to use the double internal cooldown to provide an alternate means of stacking. If a tear item has both stacks of 'can charge', and goes through either 3 second cooldown, it could provide 2 mana in exchange for the 'wasted' stack. This would mean that the slowest possible charge on a tear, by using no abilities at all, would take twice as long as Singed or Nidalee stacking the tear every time it is available. This would give the average top lane champion a full tear in around 12-15 minutes, depending on the champ.Ideally this will place evolutions at around the same point in a build as they would be if farming a tear on summoner's rift, rather than denying access to them entirely. for all but a select few champions.

Edit: As a side note, could you change evolution mechanics (in all modes) to draw from the earliest item slot rather than always AA first? Ryze would love to be able to build both, but is never able to build an AA until muramana has evolved due to seraph's taking priority.

Tear isn't a "problem" in that it isn't a viable item period outside of stuff like Singed who can reliably super-charge it.

Right now its a gigantic waste of gold on most champions who would LIKE to pick it up, but can't due to how long it takes to get it to a reasonable number of stacks.