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.
