It feels more like a game than a huge time investment like SR. I like the mode because losing teams can truly come back and win. In Dominion it's all about teamwork, map awareness, and knowing your role. In SR it's about not letting anyone get fed/farmed and push mid/grab baron. Seriously, SR snowballs so bad now due to the increased mastery buffs that if one tower falls or one character gets slightly fed then the game is just a surrender at 20. In dominion you're weakest, most killed guy, could still be capturing/ holding points and still get his equipment builds reguardless. Heck underplayed champs like Mundo and Poppy get into dominion alot and always do well.

Many of the people playing this game, particularly long time players involved in the forums, have developed a particular set of skills for playing classic - skills for winning in lane, last hitting, watching for ganks; for positioning in team fights.

Several of those skills do not translate directly into Dominion - so they are more comfortable sticking with SR, where they have already trained their skills. Then, mentally, you start searching for reasons to confirm this status quo bias.

Which I suspect is where most of these posts come from.

That isn't to say that I think Dominion is a better or worse format than SR - it certainly has its advantages and disadvantages - but it certainly isn't picking up all the hate threads from standalone merit.

In fact the map awareness is so friking hard in dominion that I expect an improvement in the hud so i dont have to play half the game pressing tab.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading through all the posts of reasons why "dominion sucks". I lol'd hard. I love dominion. I am very happy with this game mode. Its faster paced and frankly more exciting imo. It challenges u to experiment with different builds and work well with ur teammates. This game isnt all about 1 person carrying, its about teamwork and coordination. Honestly I was tired of the dumb meta of SR and the monotonous laning phase. Mostly play dominion now.

Dominion can be interesting, but you have to play with brain damaged players.

Dominion is just another little mini game. It doesn't compare at all to classic dota style game play. That is all. Not to mention characters are all balanced around being used in summoners rift. Which is why Dominion can not be ranked. Player skills have nothing to do with it, its just pretty boring when your playing it for no reason in a game that's all about ranking. Put Dominion into a pull of characters that are balanced around it and has ranking and you might have something going.

Pretty good rant post. +1

I honestly started playing Dominion heavily because it does require a very different skill set than classic - it is much, much more about knowing how to position in team fights, knowing how to micro your champion and skirmish - which have always been the weakest part of my game.

I've stuck with it because, well, that *is* the most fun part of the game. Sure, there's a lot of strategy around movement and pushing and buff control and defending objectives in SR, and the best players understand these things intuitively - but I don't play the game because dancing around Baron for a couple minutes is so fun.

Also, I still suck at combat micro, and it's great to have a bunch of combat to practice that in.

Dominion shows whether you can team fight or not it also shows stupid players from good 1s

Dom is much more fast-paced. In SR I feel suffocated starting from level 1 and farming for enough gold to start to have fun. By the time things start to get fun you probably already know whether you've won or lost. You can't play a champion in a different role because Warwick is ALWAYS jungler and Ashe is ALWAYS carry and you MUST have a tank. Not to mention, if you're just learning those roles, and you don't even know what a jungler or a carry IS, you probably cost your team the game.

SR feels like Mario Bros 1.
Level 1-1, 1-2, 1-3: Make gold by killing minions. Except it doesn't matter how much damage you do to the minions, only that you get in the last hit. WTF? At least in Mario, you don't have people stealing your last hits.
Level 2-1, 2-2, 2-3: Things get interesting. Your players always have the Fire Flower and skill is actually required. Except that that the whole game was mostly decided in level 1-3 when the enemy carry got more minion corpses hoarded than your carry.
Level 3-1, 3-2, 3-3: The fight is over. You know you're gonna win (or lose) all that matters is finding that a couple of extra points to finish your game with the most style, like bouncing off bad guys for 99 lives.
And the whole game is the same again and again and again. There's a bit of skill involved in the middle when things are actually challenging... but you probably already know whether you can do it or not.

Dominion is more like the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
You start with a few moves that will be useful the whole game, but you still have to work to get your superpower (Ocarina/Sword/Shield).
The general goal of the game is the same every time you play it (get three caps long enough to win) but how you get there changes depending on your mood and style.
Even when you've played it many times, you always find something new to surprise you. You may have Guarded the Bot Tower successfully before, but this time despite having the same skill you get overwhelmed. Or last time you lost but this time you got help.



Say you have two teams. Players A, B, C, D, and E comprise one team. Players 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 comprise the other. In Summoner's Rift, you spent 20 minutes farming, you've had a few ganks, and things start snowballing. The rules are always the same: don't killsteal, let the carry get the killing blow if you can, don't farm the carry's minions, communicate MIAs, etc. You probably already know who's winning by level 10. A comeback, if you're losing, is highly unlikely. The next game, you play against the same team, and you all chose the same champs. The specifics of this fight aren't going to change much. The carry is still gonna be in mid. The jungler may change his route, but he'll still be jungling and ganking. First Blood will probably still happen at top, and you'll probably take the tower down in the same order. The only way you can really switch it up, if you have the same players, is to switch champs. And everything is about the carry. Feed the carry, protect the carry, kill the carry.


In Dominion, those same ten players, with those same ten champs, have many many more options. Sure, it's probably the same bot champ. But that is probably the only thing that will remain the same. Everything else will change, and it's more than just the fights that will change (which they will); the strategies are CONSTANTLY changing and evolving in order to win. The rules, such as they are, are much more like suggestions. You can do a lot more with individual skill... by learning Map Awareness, you can figure out yourself where the enemies are, or where they're likely to go. You need to cap three towers... that's the only hard rule. HOW you accomplish that can be by many means: kill enemies in the FoW so they can't cap. Defend your tower. Kill their defender. Take their bot and mid and bottle them inside. Even when victory seems assured, you can't just coast to victory; if you don't keep up your vigilance, the enemy team is likely to come back and counter you. To me, that means you weren't good enough to win because you wasted your lead. They were good enough to endure and survive, props to them! You don't have one single target plus enemies, you have FIVE. And it's not all carry, carry, carry.

Yes, it's chaotic. Glorious, glorious, chaos. You learn faster, you move faster, you think faster, you react faster. You make split-second decisions that may or may not cost you a battle, but one single mistake won't cost you the game... you may lose the battle, but you can still win the war.