I play exclusively Dominion. Maybe it is because I play a lot of Mundo, but I feel like the global healing debuff could be cut back a bit. Although there are some healing champions that remain strong, it is usually not their ability to heal that makes them strong but rather some other aspect of their kit (e.g. Soraka unstoppable aoe for defending bot).

whats with all the yorick qq?

I do play dominion exclusively, sometimes play with a friend who is also exclusive, and working on bringing in a couple more. I'm level 28 now, but when 30 hits and my friends hit 30 we will try ranked, but balance is an issue whether ranked or not, or whether serious or not.

Overall I'm exclusive dominion cause I love the mode, and I'm unsure how instituting gold snowballing will affect that. I'd have to play it awhile and see. I do know that there are 5 traditional bans, and they exist for good reason, because they can be a bit too much on this map: jax, akali, poppy, rammus, shaco.

And draft takes TOO LONG. Sure its a good way of making the game more balanced, but between waiting for a draft game to queue up and going through the motions you spend more time preparing for games than actually playing them in draft.

Poppy's passive is insane. On a map where she can exclusively fight champs without worrying about laning, and with so many walls present, she is completely over the top, the other thread on the subject hit the nail on the head. I dont even know how poppy can be dealt with without changing the character herself.

Jax is counterable (not just sword of the divine, but also having a mix of AP and AD on the team) but he shuts down a lot of champions and unbalances the game. He punishes AD too hard, he can be shut down by a coordinated team that knowingly brings in a balanced squad and plans for jax, but this is too difficult to do with randoms, a good jax can usually just wreck unprepared teams. Maybe a better anti-dodge item or removing gunblade or guinsoo's would answer him.

Akali I have the least problem with of this group, and honestly incorporating lightbringer and hextech sweeper into dominion should go a lot to fixing the akali problem. She still does pretty ridiculous burst, and she can punish squishy backline glass cannons too hard a lot of the time. But I think she does not warp the format as much as some of the others.

Rammus counters AD worse than Jax. He is near unkillable for AD once he gets a couple big armor items (of course including thornmail), and he is so **** fast on top of it he is always where you dont want him, assuming he's a good rammus. I play a lot of vayne and hate hate hate rammus. Silver bolts arent near enough

Shaco is trickier, he is sort of naturally countered by the difficulty in playing him. Finding bad shacos is pretty common. I think with the box nerf he is not OP, but he is banned because he is so frustrating to play against. But then again, that's sort of his schtick and he has a new lease on life in dominion. I'm not as worried about him as Jax and Rammus and the snowballing mechanics will hurt him because while he can annoy an enemy team a lot its rare for him to rack up tons of kills, certainly he cant do it consistently before deathcap, so he wont always get his items if ambient gold is reduced, toning him down a notch again.

Just my 2 cents

-What are your impressions of the balance on Dominion? (If you're a serious player that's gearing up for competitive Dominion, I especially want to hear from you!)
Much like in normal mode, it SEEMS like a team of all DPS focused carries is the best way to roll. However, whenever I find myself on a team that works together, I find that supports and tanks and pushers are just as awesome here as in normal. You just gotta play a bit differently.

-What is your biggest pet peeve about Dominion?
That heroes are shared between the two modes without modification.

-Are there any players out there who now play exclusively Dominion?
Me and two of my co-workers. Domionion is twice as much fun as normal mode and a big step in the right direction for the MOBA genre.

-Thoughts from players who tried Dominion and feel like it just isn't their cup of tea. Are there any particular reasons that stand out? Fixable (wink wink) reasons?
Talking to some friends who don't like Domionion, their only pet-peve is the thing I like best about Dominion: it's too fast. They like the slower pace of normal mode, the 3 phases of the game etc.

-What are your impressions of the balance on Dominion? (If you're a serious player that's gearing up for competitive Dominion, I especially want to hear from you!)

Dominion is fairly balanced, and I feel that balance disparities are magnified in low-level play. The only champs that I've consistently had issues against is Poppy (she scales so well, bursts so hard and her passive is possibly the best defensive skill in Dominion...except Ali's ult) and Shaco (#1 troll champ, not too strong but so hard to keep in check if they're competent).

The metagame has evolved quite a bit already (from 10 TDPS facing off in the beginning) so that now a balanced team comp has shown a lot of promise in a coordinated team. In my experience people still have an open mind about champs and builds so the metagame may continue to evolve. It will be a while still until the full picture is revealed.

-What is your biggest pet peeve about Dominion?

Tanking is very unrewarding. With the global debuff on armor and MR it seems really difficult to resist damage, to the point where I was stacking MR on Blitzcrank and Poppy could still just explode me with a deathcap, lichbane and void staff.

The healing debuff is really frustrating too, though I see why it's necessary. I would just prefer that these issues be addressed through itemization instead of a global buff, but if this is the best way then I guess I understand.

I just don't like that with 1 item more than 50% of my defense can be nullified. A lot of these champs rely on tankiness to be effective, and don't have great offensive scaling, making them a categorically inferior pick to tanky dps.

-Are there any players out there who now play exclusively Dominion?

I haven't touched SR since Dominion was released. I could see myself returning to SR once and a while, but right now Dominion is where it's at for me. I really like the fast pace and short games, the skirmishes, and all of that. I would never want to sacrifice that aspect of the game, even if it could remedy my pet peeves.

Love dominion

As a person with limited time I am more easily able to play the faster game mode, and because of this I have only played SR once in a non practice game since it came out

HOWEVER I usually have to chose between Dominion and getting my win of the day bonus, making me play a lot of practice AI games just to guarantee that I get my points. On a related note I do buy RP for champs(I own all but 5 now), but I still need ip for runes, and so half the time I want to play Dominion I'm still playing practices games because the faster Dominion games still don't guarantee that i'll get my win of the day bonus, and because I have limited time I'm usually stuck to playing just one or the other once a day.

To help with the ip problem i've even bought IP boosts before, but after using a few I came to the conclusion that the boosts seemed really weak and limited and not worth the RP points so I stopped using them altogether

In conclusion, while helping cater to those who need a quick fix or for those with less time, Dominion only does this partially, as players who need to farm ip (ie everyone) can get their bonus from AI modes just as quickly but more reliably when they have limited time.

My Idea for fix to this? Change win of the day bonus to only 50 ip and add a "first game played bonus of +100 Ip". This lets casuals play more modes and while technically they will earn less ip, they will agree to do so if the trade off seems more worth it.

Currently Ai games are not as fun as any other mode, but are mandatory because of the ip guaranteed bonus

I play Dom exclusively unless I'm playing Coop vs AI. I appreciate that I don't have to last hit and the focus is on fighting rather than farming. The ability to actually buy stuff consistently when I return to base and test and adjust builds is a positive experience. I don't feel as if the champion balance is quite as severe as it is on SR; if you're good with a champion on Dom, even if it's not considered an optimal champ, you can usually compensate with your individual player skill. As a result, I see a lot of champs being played, and I find that fun. I also find it challenging when a losing team can pull themselves together and make it a close match.

My pet peeve is the Fog of War seems to be under utilized for strategic purposes. I guess this is a problem players will solve on their own over time. I guess another pet peeve of mine is when people try to say Dom takes no or less skill; it might be a different set of skills, but that's not "no or less".

I find that I can no longer watch LoL SR tournaments, as it seems to mostly be long periods of nothing interspersed with brief periods of action.

I will probably never be a professional player, but if I had to choose SR or Dom to excel in, I'd prefer Dom.

Coming from an EU West player:
-What are your impressions of the balance on Dominion? (If you're a serious player that's gearing up for competitive Dominion, I especially want to hear from you!)

I think champion balance is massively better than people are giving it credit for. I don't think there are any truly worthless champions nor any truly dominant ones. Many of the Stomp-effects occur due to the lack of coordination and coherence, and efficient counterpicking in a random solo queue team.

That said, I'd pick Kassadin for the strongest champion in the map; when played well, he can truly carry Dominion, something you can say for few other champions. Though this is also in part due to people not playing enough champions with hard CC on the map. Still, low cooldown blink is amazing as is packing multiple CC effects and some powerful AOE. I don't think he necessarily needs a nerf though; he's much more manageable in arranged teams (though his weakness in laning is obviously a non-issue on Dominion). Shaco is another champion with a similar kit and similar capability, though he underperforms quite often since most people play him AP, and his AD build is quite hard mechanically, much like Kassadin.

Overall, mobile champions with weak laning but strong scaling like Poppy, Blitzcrank, Kassadin and Shaco tend to perform above par on the map, alongside select few others. But again, I haven't found any of them truly problematic enough as to skew win percentages heavily in any way.

-What is your biggest pet peeve about Dominion?

Inane quests. Like when the enemy mid becomes a quest target for them because we happened to succeed a ninja capture. How are we supposed to defend it while capturing e.g. Windmill? Yeah, that's autoloss of the quest.

Windmill being quest target is another issue, as it's the natural target for attack anyways; it rewards one team for doing what they'd do regardless while forces the other team to do something super-risky. Enemy mid vs. Ally mid would be more fair than Windmill vs. enemy mid. Then both teams would be forced to do something risky to get it.

Point system is another one, but it's a minor thing since it is something I can just ignore. It's no worse than KDA on SR.

EDIT: Oh! Items. More specifically, Sanguine Blade (which pales in comparison to The Bloodthirster; needs to be brought closer to a full BT in power or need an alternative for AD casters), Odyn's Veil (which does not work on squishies, unlike Banshee's Veil it's replacing), Priscilla's Blessing (useless; since this map makes health regen irrelevant, it has no stats beyond speed boost), Prospector's Blade (c'mon, give it more Lifesteal so it's useful even without laning) & Oracle's Extract (without Vision Wards, this is the only non-slot way of dealing with stealth and with how easy it is to force a kill on someone on the map, it's very easy to remove; needs to be cheaper or have a cheaper alternative).

-Are there any players out there who now play exclusively Dominion?

Currently yes, though once I get my 2-to-1 win/loss ratio, I'll go back to ranked solo queue. 30+ min queue on a consistent basis is vexing, especially since some of the games are completely worthless. Queuing 30 mins to lose a non-contest to DC + having both, Backdoor Janna & Backdoor Shaco on your team is not very rewarding. This happens rarely enough and even out in the long run, but the queue times really amplify the vexing effect; when I queue twice longer for a game than what the game actually lasts, I kinda need the game to be of decent quality for me to find that a reasonable way to spend my time.

Of course, the only way to solve this is to get more, and better players for Dominion so I guess just marketing it more and arranging Dominion tournaments and Ranked Queues would be the way to go. Just don't let it fall the way of Twisted Treelines; push the format to get more players into it, and especially reward people for learning the map so there'd be a broader top level. Something that'd make it worth their while for Platinum-level SR players to play Dominion instead of Ranked Solo Queue. Maybe have teams play mixes of Dominion and SR in tournaments or something; something that forces good players onto the map.

I think Dominion is coming along fine. There are a couple problem champs but its not like it was at release and honestly most are manageable they just require people to deviate from cookie cutter builds.

What i would suggest has more to do with MM. I play exclusively in draft mode and there need to be stiffer penalties for queue dodging and maybe shave 15 seconds off. Between the dodgers and the amount of time draft takes i often find myself in champ select longer than im in the actual game.

One other suggestion. Ditch normal mode. Having 2 modes for dominion increases the queue times especially at higher Elo brackets.