For years the League of Legends (LOL) gaming community has enjoyed the
multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) from the comfort of their PCs. Now LOL fans
are eagerly waiting for the release of Riot Games’ latest development, Wild
Rift, a 5v5 mobile and console MOBA version of the PC League of Legends also
referred to as LOL mobile for Android and iOS. The new release dates scheduled
for the earlier part of 2021 are yet to be confirmed after Riot Games announced
a postponement of the 2020 release for all the regions due to the COVID-19
pandemic.
Ability Haste (AH) is a statistic found in both LOL PC and its latest
mobile version Wild Rift. Initially Wild Rift was using Cooldown Reductions
(CDR), but in order to maintain consistency with the LOL, Riot Games replaced
Cooldown Reductions with Ability Haste when the developer released the Patch
1.1 update. Although the changes are there to create a more balanced game that
allows for a fairer game, some players are unsure what this means exactly.
Cooldown Reduction (CDR)
Previously, Cooldown Reductions enabled players to reduce their current
cooldown period of a specific champion’s ability by 1%. This increased the
value of cooldown reductions for every CDR point as the decrease in cooldown
periods was exponential. This exponential decrease gave an unfair advantage to players
who could maximize the use of their champion's ability, possibly dominating the
game and leading to game imbalances. In the end, a cutoff of 40% was set as the
maximum CDR that a player could reach.
Ability Haste (AH)
Ability Haste is a new statistic that works similarly to CDR but
maintaining a more linear relationship between Ability Haste points and the
cooldown on a particular champion’s abilities. The AH essentially controls (increases)
the number of times a player can utilize a specific champion's ability. The
more Ability Haste points a player gains, the more they can utilize their champion’s
ability. Ability Haste can be calculated
using CDR as follows:
AH
= Base Cooldown x 100 + (AH+100)
Is There a Limit on the
Ability Haste?
Once Ability Haste replaced CDR, the previous 40% cap was removed as AH
allows players to cast abilities with 1% more frequency because AH works in
more linear increments than CDR. This allows a more gradual reduction in
cooldown reductions meaning players can reach up to 100 Ability Hastes in their
build, depending on time and skills permitting.
An Ability Haste of 100 gives a 50% cooldown reduction while CDR only
allows for a maximum of 40 %. It obviously takes more work to get to as Ability
Haste of 50% cooldown reductions than CDR because CDR works in exponential
increments rather than addictive ones. With a lot of dedication, a player can
even build up their Ability Haste to 200, which translates to a cooldown
reduction of 66.7%.
How Do You Gain Ability
Haste?
You can add Ability Haste to your build through items that have ability
haste, Blue Buff, and runes. AH stacks up additively.
Overall, the replacing of Cooldown Reductions with Ability Haste works
to improve the balance in the game and demands players to gain cooldown
reductions through strategy over time than an exponential boost that would give
them an unfair advantage. This means the 40% limit previously placed on the CDR
could be removed, i.e., AH has no limit set on it.
