I still wish on-hits would still occur during a dodge. Some champions are very reliant on those, not to mention, 10% dodge is still giving semi-rare occasions of 3 dodges in a row.

Dodge itself is very unrewarding for those who don't hit. Jax being of course the biggest issue since he turns AD and AP into health, he then builds dodge, which counters the AD side of the enemy damage and his Ulti turns that dodge into MR. Meaning he has lots of health that's hard to burst down because of the defenses he has, meanwhile he can deal a lot of damage. People are wary to make this stronger.

Dodge enables a champion to mitigate no damage, that some champions are balanced off of. Take Tristana for a semi-weak ranged carry. Her base AD is weaker than Sona's. This means that instead of a few hits for a certain amount of damage, she has to rely on more hits for a more evened out damage. If she misses 2 out of 10 hits, from the enemy having say 20% dodge (not an exact science, but saying that it did happen). Then you take Ashe, who crits her first hit, hits say 4 more times, at the same 20%, she misses 1/5 hits. The next shot of both champs can then be taken into account. Who's more inclined to hit and who's more likely to kill any said champ?

Overall, the Ashe with 300 AD only has to hit say 5 times and crit once to kill a said target. (Again it's not an exact science, but this example is based of numbers.) Now give Tristana half that AD and she's at 150. At 150, lets say she needs to hit the enemy 10 times and crit twice. If the enemy is to dodge 2/5 of all the hits taken, who's more likely to kill the enemy? The answer is Ashe, because the mathmatical probability is greater that ashe's crit will miss compared to 1 of Tristana's hits will miss. Tristana would have more chances to miss overall.

Again, this isn't an exact science, however, when you slice it thin enough, you'll see recurring moments where certain champs are countered a bit too hard by that dodge. With less dodge, it's less likely it will be abused as much, however it doesn't stop Ashe from beating Tristana in the above instance.


Dodge itself is designed to avoid the damage entirely. Crit increases damage. Crit being the modifier, much like Lich's Bane, Sheen or Trinity Blade proc, except all the time without that trigger. Dodge negates all damage, no matter how much AD you build (spells being the exception). 900 AD and 10 AD both deal no damage if the person dodges (ridiculous damage example albeit).

This means that if you can negate all damage, it doesn't matter how much damage the enemy should deal, it means it's negated at rates even faster than a Banshee's Veil. Take Banshee's Veil as an awkward comparison. Banshee's Veil blocks 1 spell every 45 seconds, but once it's down, you know it's down. Now take Dodge, it's always up. It can proc sporadically and make all the difference to an Ashe with a Jax on her face (though he does that to everyone, so maybe take someone similar instead).

Dodge itself is countered by 1 item. Crit is really countered by primarily Thornmail, but also countered by Armor in general. (I still like my idea of on-hit being able to proc, like Wit's End still dealing 42 damage, but dodge still negating the auto-attack. However, that's just silly and would be harder to balance I think, maybe.)

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Now the problem with Dodge is that it doesn't lead to fun for either side. There is a difference between "You skillfully dodged that missile, good play!" and "Hey look, you didn't even have to work to dodge that." The person who didn't hit isn't having fun for obvious reasons, "30% of my damage was just negated, not reduced." and the person who dodged might have fun at the time, but overall in the end, they haven't put out as much effort to get where they are, leading to feeling less good about themselves. (Well, really people don't think that, they think "Hey, I won, again! This is easy.") However, the lack of effort put into it simply is too rewarding.

EDIT: And I meant to end on "Which is why Riot needs to find that point where dodge is fun for both sides without being too rewarding for what little effort goes into it." however therein lies a problem, because it's very difficult to say what's fun for both sides. Nimbleness was yet another reward to something that took no effort. One could negate damage and move faster because of it. Two rewards for something that uses no effort. You build it and you've got it.

Well, that would be fine, it's simply that thus far I've seen and continue to see far too much of the removing.

Mechanics hard to balance that were just removed instead (cuz it's easier)
- Gangplank deny (Regular deny never even made it into the game, because it gave good players too much of an advantage.)
- Globals
- Mana Burn
- Ability to ward block (another situation of giving players who mastered it an advantage.)
- Jumping to wards (re-implemented after enough complaints)
- Innervating Locket!
- Ability to hit wards with different abilities when you know where they're placed
- Shen shielding himself with ult
- Phosphorous Bomb no longer blinds/ no longer reveals stealthed units
(Actually, going into skills would just take far too long because so much has been removed in that area. Ezreal heal on Essence Flux, stun on eve, .. pretty much Twitch's ult, etc.)
- Stacking of many items
- Heard talks of even removing slow from red buff, dunno status on that currently.
- Of course Dodge now (a stat that most games seem to be able to handle fine)

And there are many more I'm too tired to even recall right now. Since I've played the game though, its remained tried and true that if a mechanic is either proving somehow too troublesome to balance or provides skilled players with too much of an advantage, it's simply removed. Really, in most situations, mechanics should not ever be THAT troublesome and should only need number adjustments in one area or another.. especially when they're ones most other games seem to be able to manage.

I am aware however that there of course have been new mechanics implemented (and some finally being reimplemented, like promote), but the amount and frequency at which they're being removed really is just far more than I've seen any other game take it to before.

I think one point that hasn't been brought up enough is that dodge essentially creates an environment where AP and AD carries do not scale comparatively. Because Dodge only effects physical attacks, you cannot dodge most abilities. This creates a scenario where AD carries do not have as much an incentive to be played if there is a lot of Dodge items. If I could get to say 50% dodge, and I was facing a Tryndamere or Ashe, they would not be able to hit me often. So I would have less incentive to play them over some other champions that still offer good physical damage but are more caster related, such as Urgot.

Meanwhile your inability to dodge Brand, Anivia, or other characters attacks makes it so there is not a comparative defensive statistic for them. You can say you have magic resist still, but on that note you had armor before. So you would have Armor + dodge for physical damage and only MR for ability power, providing more incentive to play AP carries.

There is also something that people haven't notated from statistics called Standard Deviation. Or on average how far away from your expected long term average you can expect to be within reason. The more random factors you have, the more you can expect to deviate. As a developer I believe you have to make a decision on how much deviation from random probabilities is acceptable and still be fun. Consider the following situations

(Note: For the math in the following section it was assumed your normal attacks do 100 damage and crits do 200 damage)

If you have 15% chance to crit, you can expect to do about 115 damage per hit long run. You expect to deviate from your 115 damage though, about 35.7. So it wouldn't be unreasonable for you to average 115+35.7 damage for a fight, or about 150 damage. Likewise it wouldn't be that unreasonable for you to never crit averaging 100 damage for the fight.

Assuming you cannot Critically strike, with 15% dodge you average about 85 damage a strike, and still 35.7 variation. This isn't too unreasonable.

Let's assume you can do both Critically Strike and your opponent can dodge at 15% ratios, the math gets a little trickier, but in essence you can expect to do 97.75 damage per swing, but now you can expect your damage to vary about 52.63.

That's just at 15%. Let's assume now they are significant numbers. Let's say 50% Critical Strike and 25% dodge. Now you average 112.5 damage per swing long term, but can expect to vary on an individual fight by 78.05.

There are 2 things to note with this. The more kinds of random chances and the higher those chances will occur, the more variation we can expect from fight to fight. There is a 65% chance to be within 1 standard deviation of our expected average. That means that 65% of the time with our last scenario we will do on average 34.45 damage - 190.55 Damage for an individual fight. While long term we expect to get the average value, on a fight to fight basis 65% of the time, you could be anywhere.

The second thing to note is Dodge scales better than Crit. Dodge you just dodge. You avoid all damage. Dodge actually reduces Crit chance because of this. Why? I swing 100 times. At 25 percent dodge, I will hit 75% of those, so 75 hits. Now we have a 33% chance to critically strike. So out of those 75 hits 25 will be Critical Strikes. Now I just said I swung 100 times, but I only got 25 Critical strikes... Essentially dodging removed 8% of my critical strike chance.

TLDR: Dodge does not create unpredictability in and of itself... Dodge + Crit creates a massive amount of unpredictability as well as other "random" events that can occur. Dodge scales better than critical strike does.

In essence I agree with riot on one thing - too much randomness in the game makes fighting feel more like gambling than skill to skill match ups. For you gamblers out there, you may actually love the idea of the extra variation. But think about this, if you were riot and half your player base wanted some unpredictability because of the gambler excitement mentality and others wanted it to be purely skill based, wouldn't a compromise be necessary? Too much randomness and you excommunicate 50% of your player base. Not enough, and you excommunicate another 50%. So I think you are left with the decision of what random events are the most fun and the easiest to balance around. I think they chose correctly with Critical Strikes being the better of the two.

@Morello: Dodge chance could be replaced with a "Dodges every X attack." This would bring the mechanic more in line with Banshee's Veil, and would leave Jax/Sivir/Ninja Tabi users happy, would it not?

Dear Morello/ Riot,

Firstly, thanks Morello for an official message regarding this thread. I know from another red post from another thread (Pendragon) that Riot are not yet ready to fully reveal their plans for dodge, where it's going and how things are going to be (or indeed your decisions about dodge if you have decided any).

The main objection against the initial red post on this thread was that he was talking about the visual effects as an argument against dodge, rather than any conceptual rationale behind it.

If you read this thread, and I know it is a huge thread, there have been many, many good arguments as well as counterarguments about dodge, and especially the argument regarding dodge vs crit. While many here seem to be just writing their thoughts or analysis impetuously without having read those arguments (not know their exact same points were already pointed out earlier in this thread), I thought I should mention a few things about dodge as a mechanic.

1) I notice that "hard-counter nature" of dodge is one of the main problems with dodge, but in this thread it has been argued that the wholly negated damage from dodge are usually compensated by critical chance. Many posters on this thread have pointed out:

"Yes, dodge does negate one whole attack's worth of damage, BUT DOESN'T CRIT ALSO ADD THAT ONE WHOLE ATTACK'S WORTH DAMAGE TOO?"

Besides this logic, it is the mechanics of this game which allows critical chance to be built to near 100%, making it no longer an RNG element of the game. The chance of a champion crit hitting is almost always higher in every game than a champion dodging an attack, and as we all know, the crit DAMAGE boost can sometimes go up to 250% - 304% using obvious items such as infinity edge, crit damage runes etc.

Dodge, on the other hand is capped, and is mostly below 25% on champions other than Jax (I do also note that many champions use dodge runes other than Jax, Udyr and Nidalee. Many players have told us in this thread that they use dodge and dodge masteries (now gone) on tanks, AD melee champions and junglers).

The point here is that the frequency at which crit can occur is almost always going to be higher than dodge, and the extra damage that comes with one crit chance can be more than 200% of the normal attack damage, which more than compensates one dodged attack.

2) Many have also argued the counters to dodge and crit chance. The main vein of the argument for counter to crit chance has been armor (not surprisingly) and many have also argued that dodge can only be countered by one item.

Before I delve into any further issues, I just want to point out that dodge is a defensive element of the game, while critical chance is an offensive element. The former does NO DAMAGE, while the latter inflicts DAMAGE. This is where the word "counter" comes into. Some have argued that it is somewhat useless to think of countering something that does no damage to you. Indeed, if one had to choose to counter ONE of the two--crit or dodge--one would always be inclined to counter crit chance, because crit chance can kill you, whereas dodge cannot.

Another salient argument here is that more counter to crit is needed because crit chance can be built to usually over 70-80%, while dodge is capped way below that percentage. It is only logical to have more counters to crit because crit is more likely to occur in one game compared to another.

Many interpreted dodge as one of the counters to crit, because it is a well known fact among many players that crit cannot be countered by armor alone (I also note that dodge can also counter true damage, which cannot be countered by armor). Indeed, we have seen on many occasions in which a tank with 3000HP with a frozen heart and a thornmail was shred to pieces by 250% critting AD carries. Dodge only adds an extra counter to that. And even with dodge, it is usually crit chance/ damage that comes out on top of armor+hp+dodge.

However, many find the current state of the game (with dodge) balanced, at least in the context of countering crit or true damage. One prime example of this is how Jax counters Tryndamere, the champion that probably best embodies the crit chance/ damage into his kit.

Jax is a champion introduced specifically to keep those massively critting AD melee champions under control, because without Jax, they would rule the World. Then who counters Jax? Well, for starters, AP burst champions laugh at Jax because their casts cannot be dodged. And AP casters aside, we have seen fed AD carries still owning Jax after phantom dancer and infinity edge (I am being really general here). My point here is that removing dodge will break this balance, as we can see from recent threads already complaining about Tryndamere being the new FOTM with the removal of dodge in the new masteries and boosted crit chance/ damage percentages.

In short, I concede that dodge is a hard counter to crit, although it is needed to prevent a landslide fights in which crit chances/ damages can wreck the game.

3) My final point on this issue is very personal. As much as I understand the general theme of more aggresive play and aim to reduce the game time by nerfing escape mechanisms, I would also say that many value the delicacy and variety of elements that this game offers. This game is very distinc from games such as DOTA for the obvious reason, because it introduced more features that can counter each other out to bring more fun in building and learning skills to execute in teamfights. Builing rune pages, masteries, increasing crit damage as well as dodging all form part of this opinion. My point here is that (as I have experienced) a huge proportion of players in this community like this game because it is different from the old-school "who-does-more-damage" games. This game has introduced champions like Teemo, Shaco and recently Fizz, who encourage us to play with more thinking and planning and sometimes, reflex. This game was different because it does not necessary encourage all-out fight, damage and kill, but because it offers another spectrum in the game: evasion, traps, escape and also, dodge.

Indeed, many feel a huge satisfaction when they dodge a killing blow, just as when a person deals a crit hit to finish the enemy. If crit, as an RNG is here to stay, then it only makes sense dodge stays. Dodge is a hard counter that wholly negates an attack, but unlike crit, it cannot be built to near 100%. That is the compromise for the dodge mechanic - lesser chance of it occuring than crit, but a great reward when it occurs.

Finally, having written so much about our thoughts of dodge-lovers, I would like your formal answers on the following sometime soon:

1) Are you going to remove dodge completely?

2) If so, what have you decided so far about champions with in-built dodge mechanics?

3) What was the logic behind removing dodge and nimbleness from the mastery tree?

4) and a question MANY would love to hear: If you plan remove dodge completely, WILL Riot refund those IP to those with dodge seals and quints?

I really appreciate your response in advance.

MC

Not necessarily

I 100% agree with this. Not sure why all the downvotes. But if you're following this mentality, why not remove stealth and silence?

Which is why you took away Nimbleness but not Dodge?

Bumping for Riot's attention, and one more answer from Morello... Thank you!!

Great post and summary. To answer as best I can (I wrote a big thing that goes into more detail I'll get after its edited to be more well-written);

1) Eventually, yes.

2) We will adjust those to new mechanics or wrap them up into similarly-powered stats. Jax utilizes it for gameplay decisions, while on Udyr it's more about the damage reduction and power of it than a gameplay decision. Case-by-case approach.

3) Since this has been the plan, removing dodge (and therefore Nimbleness) is a piece of 1). Nimbleness was a cool mastery - if dodge was staying, we'd have left it.

4) We will be doing something to make this right for players. Details to come, but our plan is specifically about making you guys happy in this regard.