Inside Design: Dodge

Greetings, summoners!
There’s been a lot of discussion around the Dodge statistic recently, especially in the wake of our controversial decision to remove Dodge from the game. When we released the new masteries, many summoners noticed the removal of Nimbleness. This created a lot of questions about Dodge – such as its viability, how much enjoyment players get out of it, and what Dodge means to League of Legends. In light of the player concerns, we wanted to take a few minutes to talk about why we’re phasing out this stat. Over time, we’ve come to see Dodge as a problematic statistic in our game, so I wanted to take a moment to dive into why that is.

• Dodge only starts looking compelling when it can be stacked. But when stacked too high, it completely (and permanently) shuts down a subset of characters. This then causes us to have to make additional things (such as Sword of the Divine) to counter this counter, which ends up using a lot of design space simply to make the statistic fun and non-abusive. Typically, we try to avoid super hard counters like this.
• While both Critical Strike and Dodge use a similar randomization formula, Critical Strike is still countered in much the same way as Attack Damage and Attack Speed: buy Armor. Conversely, Dodge can’t be overcome by getting more Attack Damage or Armor Penetration like other defenses can. This means that Critical Strike is just a damage multiplier, whereas dodge is an entirely new defense type that doesn’t have a series of sensible counters to it.
• Historically, there have only been two actual gameplay decisions that have to do with Dodge – Jax’s Counterstrike and the former Nimbleness mastery. While both of these do have some cool nuances to them, they’re not the kind of thing that justifies an entire (otherwise problematic) system in the game. By comparison, Pantheon’s Aegis of Zeonia allows him to “block” attacks, but this block system is not available to every champion in the game. This not only keeps it from getting out of hand, but makes Pantheon more unique in the process.
• Dodge also has much more potential to remove satisfaction in a noticeable way than the other defensive stats, mostly due to its random nature. Failing to finish an opponent with an auto-attack because they happened to get their 5% chance to dodge is a pretty poor experience for the attacker, especially since the escape isn’t based on a good gameplay decision or skill-based way to survive. The fun to un-fun ratio is poor.

Based on this, we not only want to phase out Dodge from of League of Legends, but also add some new, fun runes that can change up builds and open up new options. Things like this are what make League of Legends a constantly-evolving environment that rewards adaptability and versatility, as well as mastery