As with every preseason, Summoner’s Rift is undergoing some massive changes, and this time the elemental Dragons have been once again dragged into the mix. Let’s go over the two new types of Dragons added to the game along with other relevant changes to pre-existing Drakes.
Every November brings about a wind of change for the League of Legends community, as the end of Worlds means the beginning of a brand-new Preseason. With a brand-new Preseason comes a slew of changes to the game, keeping things fresh and interesting as we work our way towards the new year. Amongst this year’s changes, the addition of two new varieties of Drakes – Hextech and Chemtech – have proven to be some of the biggest shakeups to how the game is played. In this guide, we’ll go over the ins and outs of these two Dragons to show you why you should go out of your way to slay them and what they do to Summoner’s Rift when they are the chosen ‘Soul’ for the game. Along with this, we’ll also cover changes to the Cloud Drake and overhauls of how objectives provide gold so that you can master these shifts before the next ranked season begins.
Buff: For each Hextech Drake that your team slays, each champion on your team receives 5 ability haste and 5% attack speed.
Soul: If your team obtains the Hextech soul, they gain a passive which makes their basic attacks and abilities periodically shoot out chain lightning which bounces to three targets beyond the initial target, slows units that it hits, and deals a small bit of true damage. This effect has an eight second cooldown.
Rift: When Summoner’s Rift has been converted into the Hextech Rift, several ‘Hex-gates’ spawn in key locations throughout the map (see the included map of a Hextech Rift below for example). Four of these ‘Hex-gates’ serve as one-way portals out of your base (or the enemy’s base) and into one of the two nearest quadrants of the jungle. The other portals are bidirectional and teleport an individual between behind either of the objective pits (Baron Nashor’s pit or the Dragon pit) and the other side of the river. You have to channel to enter a ‘Hex-gate’, with this channel being interrupted if you either take damage or are hit by an immobilizing effect (like a root or a stun). Each set of ‘Hex-gates’ has a 30-second cooldown per champion.
Attacking Style: Amongst the Drakes, the Hextech Drake has middling attack speed and attack damage, attacking more often than an Infernal Drake but not hitting as hard. What makes its attacks unique is that they cannot be blocked like a projectile (put simply, they are not obliterated by Yasuo’s Windwall or Braum’s Unbreakable). Every fourth attack that the Hextech Drake fires chains to three targets and slows all of them by 40%.
Notes and Advice: While the Hextech Drake’s Buff and Soul are powerful in their own right, respectively increasing your champion’s capacity to attack more frequently and offering a passive akin to a stronger version of what Statikk Shiv does, it is the Hextech Rift and its ‘Hex-gates’ that make this Drake really interesting. These gates offer an unprecedentedly strong way for anyone to move around the Rift quickly, making getting out of base and into the fray easier than ever before for both teams. This obviously means that even when someone backs or is just respawning, it won’t be long before they can get back to lane or join their team for a fight.
When fighting the Hextech Drake, it is necessary to make some effort to count its attacks so that you aren’t getting overwhelmed by its chain damage and slow every fourth strike. Since these attacks can’t be obliterated like other projectiles and prove effective at fighting multiple targets at once, approaching the Hextech Drake alone if possible is not totally ill-advised if you’re strong enough to slay it on your own.
Example Champion Pairing: One champion who seems like they’ll prove to pair well with this Drake on all fronts is Olaf. Olaf traditionally struggles from his inability to surpass walls without taking flash – something that he in turn often doesn’t want to do because Ghost is a tempting option as well. On a Hextech Rift, Olaf becomes more easily able to navigate the terrain of the jungle while also benefitting quite nicely from the attack speed and Soul buffs he could obtain from slaying a Hextech Drake.
Buff: For each Chemtech Drake that your team slays, each champion on your team gains up to 5% bonus damage against enemies who have more health than you. This bonus damage is based upon their health proportionate to your own champion’s level, maxing out at them having 340 more health at level 1 and them having 1020 more health at level 18.
Soul: If your team obtains the Chemtech Soul, they gain the ability to briefly revive themselves upon dying. When they revive themselves, they have 80% of their base health plus 50% of their bonus health, and lose this health in an exponentially-increasing way every quarter of a second. They also gain a small burst of movement speed upon reviving. In their briefly revived state, they take 40% less damage yet deal 33% reduced damage.
Rift: When Summoner’s Rift has been converted into the Chemtech Rift, each jungle quadrant has massive zones surrounding their Red Brambleback or Blue Sentinel (see the included map of a Chemtech Rift below for example) wherein all champions are camouflaged (unable to be seen by non-Control Wards and are only revealed when nearby). Champions in these zones deal up to 10% more damage to enemies with more health than them, increasing by level similarly to the Buff.
Attacking Style: Alike its Hextech counterpart, the Chemtech Drake has relatively middling offensive stats, having even a slightly slower attack speed and hitting slightly less hard than the Hextech Drake. However, it makes up for this by gaining 20% attack speed for each 10% of its health that it loses.
Notes and Advice: Where the most interesting aspect of the Hextech Drake was its corresponding Rift, what makes the Chemtech Drake peculiar is its Soul bonus. While its Buff and Rift both offer an interesting way to turn fights around and sneak around the map, the brief revive from collecting its Soul creates incredibly unique scenarios. Whichever team obtains this soul fundamentally has two chances to take down the enemy team, making them all that much harder to defeat in a head-to-head teamfight. Also, for those who played the Ultimate Spellbook gamemode over the summer, you’ll notice that this Soul is identical to what the Ruined Drake provided.
While this might be slightly obvious, the best advice providable for slaying this Dragon is to burst it down as quickly as possible. While its base offensive stats are almost comically bad when compared against the stats of other Drakes, it quickly becomes a potent threat at low-health due to gaining a tremendous amount of attack speed.
Example Champion Pairing: Since this Drake both makes the Rift much easier to sneak around and makes defeating a champion with its Soul one-on-one incredibly difficult, Kha’Zix will likely prove to fit very well with it. In the jungle’s quadrants, he can gain bonus damage from sneaking up on foes due to his passive Unseen Predator, and trying to fight him alone when he has the Soul bonus will be basically impossible due to the bonus isolated damage from his abilities.
Note: The Cloud Drake remains almost entirely similar to its previous iteration from last season, just with a small change to the Buff it provides for slaying it. For more in-depth thoughts about slaying and utilizing the Cloud Drake, please see this previously-written article about the other Drakes:
Buff: For each Cloud Drake that your team slays, you gain 3.5% bonus movement speed when outside of combat. You also gain 3.5 bonus resistance against slowing effects.
Example Champion Pairing: With the changes to the Cloud Drake now further benefitting champions who appreciate the surges of movement speed that it grants, it will likely pair quite nicely with Hecarim. While Hecarim didn’t gain much more than any other champion from the previous ultimate ability haste that the Cloud Drake’s buff provided, the slow resistance will offer him the opportunity to leverage his damage-boosting passive more frequently in combat. Beyond this, the burst of movement speed he’ll gain if he uses his ultimate while having the Cloud Drake’s Soul will be a welcome return from the previous season.
New to this preseason are Objective Bounties, an expansion of the pre-existing Champion Bounty system which rewards players for slaying enemy champions who are disproportionately ahead. When a team is deemed to be behind enough, (Something that is based upon their total experience, amount of gold, and number of dragons slain and turrets destroyed) objectives will be highlighted on their map (see below for example). Slaying these highlighted objectives provides teamwide gold, hopefully allowing the losing team to get back into the game. The following list shows how much gold is split between the team for collecting each bounty:
Baron Nashor or Elder Dragon: 500 gold (100 gold per person)
Any Elemental Drake or Rift Herald: 500 gold (100 gold per person)
Outer Turret: 250 gold (50 gold per person)
Inner Turret: 400 gold (80 gold per person)
Base Turret: 400 gold (80 gold per person)
This Preseason, like others before it, has obviously shaken up the game in a tremendous way. These aforementioned changes to Drakes and the objective system are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding how League of Legends has changed this month. However, with these changes comes an opportunity to use your increased game knowledge to outwit and outplay your opponents. Even going into the upcoming ranked season, many players will only have a surface-level understanding of how Preseason has altered the meta of the game. Therefore, if there is one idea to take away from this article, it should be that you should make an effort to use your game knowledge about mechanics like Drakes to leverage an advantage over your opponents. Knowing exactly what these Drakes do and how to fight with and around them could be the very key to winning more games and meeting increased success in the upcoming ranked season, so use the ideas from this article to give it your all out there!
