Impressions of Balance:
Some champs are blatantly OP and if picked have a large impact on the game. At best you can try to counter them. At worst they become unstoppable wrecking balls. This is why I always play draft, but 4 bans are not enough.

The most OP champs: (note: these are all counterable, but require too much effort to counter)
The unholy triad are Rammus/Jax/Akali. These are the must-bans.
The 4th ban will usually be Poppy/Shaco/Heimer/Yorick.
When any of these champs are not banned, they are usually picked in my experience.

Rammus & to a lesser extent Shaco are too good at disruption, one because of powerball, the other because of boxes.
Yorick & to a lesser extent Heimer are too good on bottom because they push too hard and defend too well.
Akali & to a lesser extent Poppy have too high of burst damage and survivability.
Jax & to a much lesser extent AD Sion have too high of sustained dps. They are almost unbeatable in a straight up fight (with items) and are hard to kite due to Jax's leap and Sion's stun.

There are also some really bad champs that only matter cause some people try to play them in spite of, or because of how bad they are, and then it is like playing a 5v4 game.

My biggest pet peeve about Dominion:
Bottom lane is a boring game-long laning phase. It seems like no one really wants to go bottom because it is boring to just lane all game. Given two equal bottom laners, it will be a game-long stalemate of killing creeps. Sure, ganks could happen, etc, but basically if you start out bottom you are shackled to it the rest of the game. To put it in perspective it is like jungling on SR but never being able to leave the jungle. To make it worse, when I queue with my friend, it seems like one of us must take bottom lane because otherwise no one will. This means we basically have to play the game separately the whole time instead of having fun coordinating. If you lose bottom, it usually takes multiple champions to take it back. So if your bottom fails you have to go take it back, usually giving up windmill and sometimes maybe even your mid base. Annoying! IMO bottom is too important to your chances of winning right now.

I play Dominion exclusively. (I've played about 200 games so far)
Before Dominion, I had nearly stopped playing SR already and started mainly playing ARAM. I noticed ARAM really growing in numbers, but after Dominion came out, now ARAM games seem to have reduced down to 1/4 the volume as before. It seems about right because I now play about 10 Dominion games for every 1 ARAM game I play. I avoid SR because in SR you do not have as much individual impact on the game. In ARAM and Dominion you can pretty much always be in the action, exerting your influence over the outcome. People dying/feeding/etc has less of an impact. If a bad player loses the turret they are defending, you don't lose it forever. You just lose some points. It is a mistake you can make up for. Dominion punishes mistakes in a far less decisive manner, and I like that because when my ally or I makes mistakes it doesn't matter as much.

P.S.
I will second what many have said. Mages have a big cooldown issue. I usually try to max my cooldowns because of this. I think changing the cooldown hardcap to 50% would be enough to fix this problem though. Second, Rod of Ages is a staple mage item, but needs to stack faster in dominion. Just make it stack twice as fast and problem solved. Third, I agree the vision from the points pierces too deep into the middle area, and I especially hate it how fog of war above a point just disappears once that point is captured. So if you were trapped in that fog you get a giant spotlight on you. It's not really fair.

Yes I now exclusively play Dominion

While I feel Dominion isn't quite as unbalanced as some claim, there are some issues, both within champions and items. The main issue seems to be with carries, or specifically, hyper carries. Often times a team composed of champions that simply "scale better endgame" while find themselves head and shoulders over the opposing team, even with a bad start. A bad start can be made up for later, a team of super scaling cant be avoided in the end, unless the game is won VERY quickly, which is unlikely with competent players.

Another issue is mobility, mobility is powerful here but a few specific champions can abuse this (Rammus) much more than others. Others already talk about this a lot.

Items! Unless you play bottom,, you will almost never see a full build, and often only a half build. I have games that end with em only having three items! Some items have nice halfway points that are worth their weight in gold and don't talk all game to get. These items include things like, Glacial Shroud, Fiendish codex, hextech revolver, brutalizer,zeal, sheen, phage, etc. I find II often perform better stacking in these "unfinished" items then filling out as I need too in later game. I would like to see a larger variety of such items so we have more ways to fill out builds that aren't based off of expensive as hell SR itemization.

My biggest peeve is trying to fight on a tower and suddenly I am channeling, I cant break this channel until the animation finishes, I am now dead. In a battle people will be moving around (usually) so this is a very easy misclick to make and very frustrating when it happens at the wrong time.

-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 the current balance of dominion is very solid. I feel there are a few champs that are a bit strong right now but nothing completely broken. Rammus and Yorick are probably the two that are most difficult to play against. Yorick is probably the best bot laner as he can push very easily and deals quite a bit of damage. Rammus is extremely good at getting to points quickly and his tankiness makes it difficult to kill him. Also, I think Sion's ult lasts a bit to long. Decreasing the duration by 5 seconds would be a good change I believe.

-What is your biggest pet peeve about Dominion?

It is extremely frustrating to play against a shaco or a champ who simply tries to cap points you are not at. I really think the pricillas(?) item should be removed. It simply promotes poor play.

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

I started playing dominion exclusively to get ready for ranked but now I find myself going back to SR. The reason is that I really enjoy playing ranked and there is not a current option for ranked dominion. If they released ranked I would again spend the majority of my time playing dominion.

-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!)

Seems pretty decent altogether, but I'm not a fan of the healing reduction, except in the case of lifesteal.

People like to say how bad AP is on this map, but AP casters are actually still good in teamfights. Problem is right now there isn't a real big teamfight metagame, so you're never going to find 4 people grouping up in a tiny circle to be Tibbered. You're going to be using that Tibbers against a Xin who jumped you, and he's going to kill you anyway because lol rightclicks. That's why AP feels bad.

-What is your biggest pet peeve about Dominion?

Lifesteal/spellvamp "free sustain" feels bad. Their health never goes down. Maybe yours doesn't either because you also have lifesteal. It's boring and annoying, and it makes anyone who hasn't reached a certain damage threshold essentially useless.

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

I stopped playing for awhile and dominion got me into playing again, so I suppose.

Balance impressions:
-Overall the game feels great now that the spawn timers are more fair. The only champion I truly feel is overpowered is Rammus. His ability to fight champions is just too great when combined with his mobility. I think the cooldown on his ult is a big factor, and his W having too much uptime. Aside from Rammus, I think the game is overall very well balanced with everything having viable counter-plays.

Pet Peeves:
-Bad players? lol kidding :P
-Too much free vision given by the 4 points other than the windmill. It just extends too far in to the jungle, it's really annoying to work around it.

Play Dominion exclusively?
-Yes, I do. I quit LoL for about 6 months and returned when Dominion was released. SR suffers from the same problems that all other MOBA games do, and while you guys have mitigated those issues some, the games are still decided by the 15-20 minute mark in most games, and the last 20-30 minutes are just delaying the inevitable if you're on the losing side. Dominion is fast paced and you are NEVER out of it until the very few points of health are ticking off your nexus.

We need ranked Dom.

Don't rush into it. There are champion balance problems, as noted above in detail. I mostly notice that many assassins are just too good on Dom. But once we have ranked Dom, successful strategies and moves will trickle down into the playerbase and reduce the headless chicken chaos that is pretty normal. I hope it is a priority.


Personal score is kinda useless. I don't really have a suggestion, because all too often, smart Dom play isn't quantifiable so couldn't be scored as such. Except perhaps downplay personal score in favor of achievements. Most kills/most points neuted/capped would be more meaningful than an amorphous "score" in some cases boosted by straight up bad play.


A little thing, but it really bugs me:

On Summoner's Rift, if you mouse over a structure, you see its name and its current health.

You don't get this on Dom. It would be super effective.

Especially if you are a brand new Dom player trying to figure out where the F the Quarry is.

I will play rank dominion when it is released and I would like to have a slightly less costly Priscillas *everyone gasps*

I would like this because it would give dominion a whole new starting path go bot to help the cap then to the enemy mid to disrupt them. currently only shaco can do this with his boxes and I would like it to be a viable strategy for anyone

please try it in play testing to see how it turns out

-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!)

There are always going to be a few champs who are just a little bit better because it's a faster paced game and I've come to accept that. Mages seem especially gimped though since the only new item they really got was Hextech Sweeper(which I absolutely love btw, bring this to Classic Games please). Like another poster said the only really options a caster has for mana + AP are ROA and AAS and both of those recquire time to charge which you just dont have in Dominion.

-What is your biggest pet peeve about Dominion?

The only real issue I have is with Global ults in this one. Gangplank in particular is capable of stopping any number of enemies from taking a point from anywhere on the map with his ult. The duration is short sure but its almost always enough time for the enemy team to show up and wreck your day. The other global ults are also frustrating but none nearly as much as Gangplanks.

My group of friends started playing it at first but don't play it at all. The reasons vary.

One person is hyper competitive in SR so he says Dominion is terribad because it's not SR and it has no strategy or skill etc.

Another reason is that the range of champions that are truly viable is still low when we stopped playing. I was finding surprise viability in champions and it may be better now but some champs don't look as if they'll ever be viable. I assume the high passive armor pen is because of the magic pen mastery but regardless of whether it does have an effect people still were using lots of bruisers because of it.

The rubber band mechanics that were admitted to after initially being denied that allow the losing team to stage artificial comebacks just weren't fun at all and were rage making as we work hard for that early game advantage before suddenly having the game work against us and the other team getting these bonuses that made it near impossible at times for us to keep our lead ending in a loss that should never have happened. Back capping isn't fun either. It just wastes your time, it's worse than backdooring (i'm more than happy with backdooring when it's a coordinated strike from an entire team after a good fight and creeps are still far off for example but something should be done about a random Yi just tanking a tower because they're losing imo, same principle applies in Dominion).

The big one I think however is that there's nothing satisfying about winning a match of Dominion because at the end all that happens is that you just 'win'. There's no climax where you charge the enemy Nexus for the win or anything, it just happens. In general it's just not very satisfying.

Comebacks aren't nearly as interesting either as it's just kind of part of the game. There's been times where we've comeback from almost having our Nexus destroyed in SR and it was amazing but nothing like that can happen in Dominion as there is definitely a point where you simply can't comeback even after a good fight as you can't reach control points in time as the points go to 0. The point in which you can not win a Dominion game happens earlier than in SR imho.

You wanted to make a mode that was less snowbally as if making SR less snowbally was an impossibility which I just don't agree with but you ultimately ended up with a game that wasn't as exciting if you actually took a second to think about it.

A few other thoughts. Whenever I'm taking Storm Shield and I notice my opponents shield is there I always feel like I should be able to "sabotage" them in some way. Whether that be in the form of disabling their shield or stealing it or whatever you may decide I feel like there should be something that you can do to their shield. In a combat experience it hardly makes sense that I would just stare right at my enemies' care package and just leave it alone. Why am I just letting them have this buff again?

Also I miss jungle camps.I have no idea how those could possibly be introduced into dominion but I want to kill stuff and get buffs.