In modern League of Legends, neutral objectives are often a key win condition in a game at hand. While Baron Nashor and Elder Dragon are enormous, often game-ending objectives, the Elemental Drakes (and subsequent dragon soul) can be just as important to the state of the game, if not more so.
Throughout the early game in League of Legends, teams often must make a choice. Do you focus early Elemental Drakes, or do you try to acquire gold around the map through rotational plays and the Rift Herald? In high-rank solo queue and professional play, many games play out with one team securing the first two Drakes and the other accruing a small yet significant gold advantage. This advantage can help leverage early and mid-game objectives, and provide a small item advantage for early teamfighting. However, securing the first two Drakes can put pressure on the other team, somewhat forcing them to attempt to prevent the third Drake from being taken, lest the Dragon Soul be threatened.
As the Dragon Soul is a permanent, significantly powerful buff valued equal to thousands of gold, it more than overshadows the early advantage of the other team if taken successfully. Choosing between the two strategies can be difficult, but the deciding factor can often be which of the four distinct Dragon Souls are available in the game at hand, and how it interacts with your current team composition. As such, let’s take a look at each of the four Elemental Drake types, how they and their respective Dragon Souls can affect the game, and how this can relate to different team strategies.
First up is good old Infernal Drake, the much-desired firework that can make any game interesting. The Infernal Dragon’s effects are pretty simple: take dragon, get more damage! Take Infernal Soul, and your basic attacks and abilities make area-of-effect fiery explosions that do even more damage! As such, one can imagine that teams who like to teamfight want this Soul. In chaotic teamfights with abilities flying everywhere, Infernal Soul’s effect can absolutely swing the battle to your favor, and that’s not even considering the extra stats the Dragons themselves give you. For the same reason, one can imagine that the more damage-dealers a given team has on their squad, the more heavily they should prioritize Infernal Drakes. While this may be true, bruisers and tanks can benefit greatly from the Soul’s effect in their own right, as the extra damage it provides can allow them to more effectively influence a fight—whether they are threatening the back line or are simply in a front-line brawl.
As mentioned earlier, most gameplans can be made more explosive (quite literally) through acquiring the Infernal Soul. Team compositions that like to fight, whether they are engaging dive comps or front-to-back extended fight comps, absolutely should prioritize these dragons. However, where Infernal Soul shines brightest is in extended battles, where the Soul’s explosive effect can be refreshed and re-used multiple times for fantastic value.
A perfect example of this is poke compositions; champions like Varus, Zoe, Xerath and the like can easily abuse this extra burst of damage extensively and often with their long-range, high-damage abilities. Infernal Soul makes these annoying, often oppressive compositions absolutely impossible to dance with around objectives, as volleys of explosive ammunition rain from afar over and over again. It also helps to cover one of these compositions’ weaknesses in being engaged upon in a teamfight, as the added area-of-effect damage can help to close the gap in damage over time throughout the fight. Overall, poke compositions that acquire Infernal Soul are to be feared, and opposing teams should do everything in their power to prevent them from doing so.
Another strategy that can benefit a surprisingly great deal from Infernal Soul is the split-push composition. In such strategies, one person attempts to become an unanswerable pressure point on one end of the map, while the rest of their team leverages this pressure on the opposite side to secure objectives. When done well, the split-pushing champion is already difficult to deal with, taking favorable trade after favorable trade against whichever unfortunate enemy is tasked with defending against them.
However, with Infernal Soul in hand, the split-pushing champion can leverage these trades even harder, and can more easily threaten tower dives against their opponent that can blow the game wide open. In addition, the group of four players without their split-pusher can much more easily win four versus four skirmishes with the Infernal Soul’s fighting power, making answering any point on the map incredibly difficult. Finally, split-push comps should be incentivized to take the Infernal Soul due to how damaging it can be to their strategy if secured by the other team. With the soul in hand, the enemy team can much more easily win the aforementioned four versus four skirmishes, and the champion tasked with trading with the split-pusher can fight back in trades much more easily with the added damage. All in all, Infernal Soul lives up to its name with explosive gameplay, but is also pivotal to those who wish to fight in extended, drawn-out battles.
Another wildly popular set of Drakes, the Ocean Soul is one of the most actively noticeable effects in the later stages of the game. The Drakes themselves provide two and a half percent missing health regeneration every five seconds per drake taken, and the Ocean Soul provides massive amounts of healing whenever you damage an enemy (with reduced but still significant effectiveness on minions and monsters). This soul can almost single-handedly win teamfights, and I don’t say that lightly.
In any at least somewhat balanced fight, the team with Ocean Soul holds an incredible advantage over their adversaries, and extended fights can easily become unequivocally one-sided. Any team that wishes to teamfight should relish the chance to secure this Soul, especially those that favor structured, front-to-back styles. The front line becomes nearly unkillable when positioned correctly, and successfully diving and killing the back line becomes incredibly difficult without access to some serious burst damage.
In addition, having the Ocean Soul makes damage taken from the Baron and Elder Dragon seem negligible while securing them, making pressuring around these objectives and forcing advantageous teamfights much, much easier.
Speaking of pressure, there are a few types of team compositions that should feel a bit of it when Ocean Soul is on the cards—namely, split-push, dive, and poke comps. As for the former, Ocean Soul can work to benefit the split-push comp itself. The group of four champions can much more easily pressure objectives, and can survive fights much more easily—this not even acknowledging the split-pusher becoming highly unkillable without significant effort.
However, if the opposing team secures the Soul, life becomes very hard for the split-push comp. Creating pressure as the group of four champions becomes much harder when the opponents don’t need to worry about their health bars, after all. Not only that, but any split-pushing champion will find it difficult to pressure an opponent that can nearly fully-heal after every trade simply by hitting minions and jungle camps—not to mention the trades themselves becoming much less effective. For those reasons, split-push comps should heavily prioritize preventing the opponents from securing the Ocean Soul, regardless of whether or not they themselves wish to acquire it.
Another strategy severely hampered by the Ocean Soul is the dive comp. As the name implies, dive comps try to win fights by diving into the back line, blowing up the enemies that comprise it and crippling the enemy team’s fighting power. One can imagine that granting said back line significant healing can throw a wrench in that strategy. Unless you’re packing some serious crowd-control abilities or can one-hundred-to-zero the enemy back line instantly, wiping them out becomes significantly more difficult if you cede the Ocean Soul, so don’t let the enemy team secure it if you can help it. Otherwise, you’ll likely come to regret it quite heavily.
Finally, let’s revisit poke compositions. The entire point of a poke comp is to sit back, fire off long-range abilities, and chunk down the opponent’s health bars with annoying, highly un-interactive gameplay experiences. Unfortunately, with the Ocean Soul in hand, enemies can render arrows, bombs, and all other manner of poke abilities highly ineffective without a significant gold advantage behind them. Of course, poke compositions themselves can benefit from securing the Ocean Soul outright. Teamfighting becomes much easier when necessary, and the Soul itself actually provides very helpful mana regeneration from hitting enemies as well—a big plus when spamming abilities is your plan of attack.
However, what’s most important to note is that if the enemy team secures the Ocean Soul, then poking them out becomes nearly impossible on an otherwise-even playing field, so don’t let them have it!
Defensive stats can be somewhat overlooked when not playing a tank, even if you acquire them passively. A good example of this is the Mountain Drake. Taking each Mountain Drake progressively grants you bonuses to your armor and magic resist stats, which can be hard to visualize during the game while you’re playing it. However, despite this, Mountain Drakes can be very beneficial to take for any champion. Tanks become even harder to take down, and traditionally squishier champions can gain a small amount of much-needed survivability without having to deviate from their standard item builds. Beyond that, it goes without saying that the Mountain Soul that comes after—which grants a shield that regenerates after five seconds without taking damage—would be a great boon to any team.
The Mountain Drakes’ passive armor and magic resist buff is based on percentages for these stats—that is, the more armor and magic resist you have, the more they get raised by each mountain drake taken. As such, tanks, bruisers, and other champions that build extra defensive states through items benefit more from the Mountain Drakes they take. Team compositions with many of these champions should prioritize them more than those who have only one or no champions of this nature. In addition, teams that do take the Mountain Drakes should consider adding more defensive stats to their builds to capitalize on their deceptively powerful effect. The later the game goes, the better these stats will scale, and the more value you’ll get out of your mountain drakes.
The Mountain Soul, like its respective Drakes’ effect, can seem a bit underwhelming. A two-hundred health shield? Even with it scaling via a champion’s bonus attack damage, ability power, and bonus health, the Ocean Soul’s healing starts at one-hundred and sixty health, and that scales too, so what gives? While it’s true that the Ocean Soul in theory “prevents” more damage in fights due to how often its healing effect triggers, the Mountain Soul’s shield shouldn’t be undersold. The key is in the passivity of it; while Ocean Soul requires one to attack enemies to trigger its healing, the mountain soul activates every five seconds simply by not taking damage. This can be incredibly useful in many situations, namely ones where extended fights or skirmishes take place.
Compositionally speaking, the Mountain Soul benefits teams on the back foot. Teams that wish to sit back and scale, play defensively, and thwart engages against them thrive with the extra defensive stats and regenerating shields. Front-to-back compositions and other teams with strong front lines also benefit greatly. However, where the Mountain Soul shines brightest is in countering the enemy strategy. The added shield and resistances make dive compositions much harder to execute, protecting your back line for longer and defusing the enemy engages.
Matchups where staying in lane often—such as against one-three-one and singular one-four split push strategies alike—also become easier, as sitting back for a few seconds to let the passive shield regenerate can be done easily and often. Finally, combating poke compositions becomes significantly easier for the same reason, as you will often have time to let the shield regenerate, and this combined with the Drakes’ added resistances will make the enemies’ damaging abilities harm you much less than normal. Overall, the Mountain Soul can be considered one of the more boring effects of the four Dragon Souls due to how defensive it is in nature, but if defence is the name of the game then look no further!
Last but not least, we have Cloud Drake; perhaps the most overlooked of the four. Taking a Cloud Drake grants the champions on your team ability haste on your ultimate abilities—a fantastic passive buff for those with very short or very long ultimate cooldowns. This is a very impactful effect, but similar to the Mountain Drake, it’s hard to notice at times, especially due to how much ability haste is often accrued through standard build paths. In addition, having one’s ultimate ability become available before that of their opponent is difficult to take advantage of; it can feel like a mostly irrelevant buff in many scenarios where you aren’t just fighting constantly. However, in those skirmish-heavy games its impact can be incredible, and for champions with impactful global abilities with long cooldowns—Shen, Karthus, Gangplank, and the like—the ability haste can be invaluable, without even mentioning the Cloud Soul that comes later.
Cloud Soul is an interesting buff—it’s far and away the most situational of the four Dragon Souls. Not only do you gain a ten percent bonus to your movement speed that persists from the moment you secure the Soul, but when you use your ultimate ability it skyrockets to a whopping sixty percent. Unfortunately, there’s a thirty second cooldown on that latter effect (sorry, fellow Karma players), but that effect itself can be monumentally useful in certain scenarios. Bursts of movement speed can be hard to make use of regularly, but there are two very simple, very broad instances when it can be effective: engaging and disengaging.
The former take a very simple form: when you want to run at someone, running at them faster is pretty much unequivocally better, no? When playing a team composition that wants to initiate teamfights—utilizing champions like Rakan, Malphite, and Alistar to create havoc with crowd control to do so—sixty percent bonus movement speed can be an incredible tool. This is also true in the case of dive compositions, where the burst of speed allows champions like Renekton, Olaf, and Udyr to get in quickly and stick onto the enemy back line like glue, chasing them down relentlessly. In these aggressive, high-octane comps, where getting in and going crazy is the strategy, the Cloud Soul’s burst of movement speed is a buff to be feared, and the added ability haste in the background helps make those repetitive fights all the more winnable.
Despite these clear-cut examples of champions and strategies that benefit from the Cloud Soul’s active effect, there’s another category of benefits from securing the buff. The burst of movement speed is great, but the passive ten percent bonus to movement speed is nothing to sneeze at either. In addition to simply getting to lane faster, moving through the jungle quicker, and rotating before your opponent as a result of this buff, there are certain champions and playstyles that heavily benefit from just being a little faster.
For example, champions that like to roam—Twisted Fate, Ahri, Pyke, Bard, the list goes on—all appreciate the extra movement speed greatly, as they can rotate from one area of the map to another to influence specific pressure points. In addition, split-pushing champions can make wonderful use of this passive movement speed. The Teleport summoner spell won’t always be available, after all. Sometimes you just have to run over to the action the old-fashioned way, and ten percent bonus movement speed can be huge in doing so. It may not be the flashiest buff, nor is it the most widely-abusable of the Dragon Souls, but Cloud Soul has its moments, and in those moments it absolutely matters.
All in all, any Dragon Soul taken successfully is going to be impactful. They’re all game-changing buffs with thousands of gold’s worth of stats, after all. However, there are many decisions that must be made in League of Legends regarding which objectives to prioritize, when to prioritize them, and when to simply ignore them in favor of gold on the map.
Knowing how your team’s champions (and the enemies’, for that matter) interact with the Drakes on the map can influence how heavily you factor them into your game plan. This goes extra for the Dragon Soul, as knowing which ones both teams synergize with can help you blow the game wide open if played out correctly. Take care to plan accordingly, and to communicate with your team so that you can secure these important objectives!
