Eh? If we are considering splitting auras, why not just let players pick which aura they activate in the beginning to avoid the "omg pigeon holing" thing?

+1 to keeping mana regen. It only shoves a few very specific champions into lulz territory.

I like Sauron's suggestions in general:

Mana regen should stay. (very important for mages)

Max energy or energy regen does need some help

Fury generation needs help: maybe you could gain fury by sitting on your turret?

removing Healing reduction is fine but due to blind pick its hard to know when to counter a strong sustain opponent by taking ignite, or a champ who has or synergizes well with a healing reduction item

What if the the exp aura could accelerate over time? for example, keep the current rate until level 6, but maybe from 6-12 it could be 15-25% faster, and then from 12-18 another 15-25% faster. this keeps the rate of level gain the same in the early game, but gets everyone to the higher levels a bit quicker for the end game.

Gold generation is probably fine as is, due to hypercarries... but again, what if the rate started getting faster later in the game, allowing for more full builds in the latest stages of the match? once the fed carries and farming bot laners get all their items, they really cant do anything with extra late game gold.this could further negate snowballing.

the penetration auras are nice, but they can probably go. class specific auras would be really hard to do in my opinion since hybrids would certainly be in trouble...
Another option is just giving a bonus to the penetration that you actually get... so instead of a 10% penetration aura for everyone your flat and % arpen and magic pen is boosted a percentage.
for example, a standard arpen carry starts with 31 arpen (marks quints, 21 offense), so if the aura was say, a 20% boost, they would get 37 arpen instead 31, brutalizer would give 18 instead of 15 pen, etc etc.)
this way a tank that has 0 penetration runes, masteries and items gets 0 bonus penetration. but a carry building lots of penetration would benefit more from their items, and still be able to displace tanks.

The regen aura needs to stay and consideration needs to be extended to energy and fury champions

I like where the gold and experience aura is at. The grevious wounds aura still makes sense and shouldn't go. Skills that cost health though might want to be looked at, perhaps through the class specific aura.

With resistances costing 10-20% more in S3 and the change to how penetration works I don't think the penetration portion of the aura needs to stay.

The really interesting idea is the class specific auras. I think for it to work you would need to start by going through each of the champions and reconsidering their tags, since they now aren't just a recommendation tool but actually have gameplay significance. You would possibly have to create dominion specific tags and list them separately.

This borders on champion specific changes between game modes and might tread on previous statements about not having different sets of champion statistics in order to preserve consistency, but if the tags were readily visible and easy to understand then it might not feel so weird that they would behave a little differently.

Another concern is champions that have different playstyles and roles depending on their build. These champions would want a different set of tags depending on what their build is, but at the same time if you give them every tag they fit into they would go nuts. How would you tag Kayle, Kog'Maw, Jax, etc?

Personally, I feel that the Mana Regen absolutely has to stay. It really enables some champions to use their low cooldown abilities agressively, rather than conservatively, which adds to the whole point of Dominion being a faster paced game mode. Don't touch this.

I think alternative resources like Fury/Energy need help though. Energy regen should go up, and I think Fury generation should go up too since there is far less time spent autoattacking minions to get it in the first place. Like some have said above, perhaps you can gain fury by defending your turret, or maybe you just don't lose it?

I don't think we need the Penetration Auras though. They should probably be dropped so that all the high HP tanks/bruisers building super defense and still doing tons of damage need to consider what to build a little bit more. If they want damage, they should build damage. Again, good ideas above me like making it a multiplier on existing Armor/Magic Penetration so that you get more from it if you build it, but nothing if you don't (this is, of course, if you want to keep the Pen aura around).

It is my opinion that bruisers currently benefit from aura far more than any other type of champion. For example, Darius and Wukong are able to make armor nearly obsolete with standard bruiser builds on the map. Since the damage each champion deals is predominantly physical, and they already have armor penetration, the aura makes building to defend against these champions to be very difficult. The armor penetration statistic combined with the mana regeneration that offsets the cost of their abilities makes this subtype of champion extremely powerful. The only reason that we don't see more of them is because Blackfire Torch is so strong right now.

The penetration on the AP side isn't nearly as bad. Traditional mages, like Vladimir and Annie, certainly benefit from it. The problem on this side of the aura is that other champions that don't need the penetration end up dealing too much damage with it.

Speaking of Vladimir, the healing debuff from the aura should really be removed. A lot of the champions with heals just aren't worth running due to their inability to sustain themselves properly. It also hits some really weak champions on the map and it makes them even weaker. For example, do either Renekton or Vladimir really need that healing debuff? They aren't particularly powerful on the map.

The problem with giving a buff designed for each type of champion is that it makes the players conform to Riot's idea of a champion type. Soraka is a support champion on Summoner's Rift, but I see her played in the bottom lane of Dominion more often than I see her at the top of the map. I don't want her to have some crummy bonus from the aura that I'll never benefit from because Summoner's Rift dictates that she played a support and thus her champion "tags" reflect such a decision. Unfortunately, meta isn't something that you can really balance around. It would be very time consuming to analyze how champions are played at the different Elo brackets so that you (or your team) could make an informed decision about what can be done for each champion.


I think that the complete removal of the offensive and defensive portions of the aura would increase champion diversity. It also increases the importance of health kits, but I'm lukewarm about placing such a heavy emphasis on those kits. That may be because Teemo is so powerful right now and he has the ability to prevent an enemy team from acquiring the health kits. On the other hand, I'm not sure it will help champions like Fiora and Tryndamere, but I have a difficult time believing that it will hurt them as both of them would benefit from the removal of the healing debuff on the aura. Xerath, Nidalee and Karthus are the only true mages with percentage based penetration and they aren't exactly the pinnacle of power on the map.

The additional gold and experience over time are the best thing about the aura. It allows everyone to stay on equal footing since the map isn't all about killing enemy champions and farming minions.

My final verdict is that the removal of the offensive and defensive parts of the aura would likely be for the best. However, we're on the cusp of Season 3. There are a lot of items that will increase and decrease the viability of champions. As much as I hate for Dominion to languish in the bowels of limbo, we will likely need sufficient time to see how the upcoming items will affect the map before any significant changes can be made. The players will have a lot of difficulty discerning what is and isn't too powerful if we have all of these changes presented to us at the same time as the new items.

here is my philosophy on how the aura should work. you should get bonus to stats based on what you buy

the biggest problem i see is with the mana regen aura currently it does help mages deal with mana constraints however it practically frees bruisers from having to worry about mana altogether. the way i see fixing this is to have the mana regen scale on buying mana regen. in other words if you buy mana regen you could additional scaling regen based on how much extra you've got (meaning base regen is not factored into bonus scaling) this way if you need mana regen you'll buy an item that gives it and it will scale up accordingly since more regen is needed in dom so if you buy a chalice and the bonus regen is say double you'll now have a double chalice passive

edit

this

here is why this change works

1. bruisers will no longer get free regen to rofl spam
2. kassadin will no longer get free regen except from tog if he builds it.

next i would like to address the penetration aura. the way i would change it is that you get bonus flat pen for buying resists and bonus percent pen for buying damage. im not sure if this would quite work out but i feel its worth looking in to im afraid it might benefit bruisers too much but buying damage should benefit more than buying resists in terms of who gets more bonuses so that burst casters and ADC have a better chance

i hope i made sense if i didn't just tell me

This is not possible. Just take the example of crit damage for ADC, well what about say Kayle, varus, kog who have long been heavily magic damage oriented? Suddenly the passive is not optimized for them. CC reduction for tanks? Do we really want Alistar being HARDER to control? Giving mages CDR might be nice except there are the energy casters that are constrained by their energy not their cooldowns.

Too many different types of champions fall under the same tag making tag based aura's pretty stupid. You could do auras specific to each champion but that just leads to what amounts to buffs and nerfs to the champion, something riot I thought was trying to avoid and was why they put the aura in.

Honestly the whole point of the aura is to avoid individual balance changes for the map, which is just a naive and foolish concept. As long as the champions are the same on all three maps there is nothing you will ever do to balance them. The aura utterly fails at its whole purpose.

This is the latest version of my proposed aura changes that I could find:

CS aura increased mana regen only applies to bonus mana regen, not base, and increased (250%?)
Maximum mana reduced by a %
Armor/MR shred/pen effects reduced by a %
Abilities that scale on % of opponent's maximum health reduced by a %
CDR added (does not count against 40% CDR cap), which is higher for ultimates
>Base< attack speed of champions increased by a flat amount
All auto-attacks gain a small % of AP as magic damage
Rage generation increased by 2% for each 1% of rage missing
Reduction of HP costs for abilities
Aura includes a small amount of Tenacity (does not stack with items)
Health of shields reduced by a %
Base AD reduced by a %

Plus a new one replacing the current healing reduction:
Healing is reduced by 2% for every 5% of health remaining.

So, at 0 health, you get full healing, but at 100% health, healing is reduced by 40%. This would improve the effects of healing in clutch fights, but prevent the issue of easily topping your health off. Champions with crazy amounts of sustain, like Nunu, would have a harder time maintaining 100% health, making ganks on bot lane more valuable against them, but as they get lower, the healing would still help them stay in lane.

Note that the above was trying to solve Dominion balance issues without making new specific items. Once itemization is nailed down a bit more, we'll be able to have a better idea of what is now weak, rather than what used to be.

As for the % pen auras, as long as bruisers and tanks are the dominant force on the map, I can't support removing or reducing it. It does seem strange that the armor pen part is stronger than the magic pen part, though, so once the whole BFT thing settles down, it might be worth bumping that up.

An idea for if you go with role specific auras.

As many people above me have mentioned it gets very problematic to just assign roles to champions. Quite a few champions have 2-3 roles that they can play. So what if you made different auras buyable items for something like 1 gold at the start of the match. Make it a use item like a potion and give a permanent buff, then just make them all unique with each other so every person can only buy 1 aura.

That way you can make multiple auras for different kinds of champions but allow people to play champions the way they want. It could even open up counterplay for certain champions depending on the auras.

Just food for thought.

Reduce shield effect