Dominion

[Krill]

So, who actually plays this? I play it a lot atm as it's the best way to farm IP and I like the quicker games, but anyone else have any thoughts on it?

[sunrise089]

Pros:

*IP Farming (First win of the day still applies, right? Beyond that I'll just take Krill's word that the IP-game/minute is better than on Summoner's Rift).

*Shorter games

*It's random, so if you want to win ~50% of your games you'll usually be able to.

Cons:

*It's random, so if you want to play a strategy game with meaningful choices look elsewhere.

Disclaimer: I'm sure there are technically meaningful choices in Dominion, and it's less random than at launch I guess (gold and xp gain rates have gone down). But I still liken it to playing a FPS team game where you have a shared pool of 100 lives per team, but where dead players only regenerate on a team once all five players on that team have been killed. In theory one side could win 100-0, but in reality what will tend to happen is the game will proceed lockstep until a final battle at 5-5 (or 50-50 in Dominion). See also the NBA

[uberfish]

I play mostly dominion atm. I find that people tend to underrate minion pushing and farming on this map. A big wave can do serious damage to towers to the point of neutralizing them, and makes life difficult for the defender especially if they don't have a spammable AOE. And with the creeps worth 30/60 gold each you can get equivalent gold to a PvP kill pretty quickly.

Having said that I generally play something like gangplank/katarina/blitz and focus on roaming. I think 1 in each lane and 3 roaming should be the default midgame for a team content to defend on 3 towers. If you have early game heroes on your team though vs their late game heroes, it's definitely worth taking risks to push for the enemy side towers and try and win quickly.

I see a lot of people still taking flash on this map and I think it's a bad choice. Ghost is better.


@Sunrise, SR is just as random as dominion is. The randomness lies in the matchmaking.

[Dantski]

I play a little bit of Dominion, its ok for 1-2 quick games but the lack of structure can be off putting sometimes. Unlike what a lot of people say, I think snowballing does play a role in this map, if you get behind early on its very hard to be that effective vs those who had a good early game.

[Speaker]

I play a little bit of Dominion, its ok for 1-2 quick games but the lack of structure can be off putting sometimes. Unlike what a lot of people say, I think snowballing does play a role in this map, if you get behind early on its very hard to be that effective vs those who had a good early game.

I agree with this. I've played a bit of Dominion now, and my take on things is that the team who first controls the middle tower, and then never overpushes and gets ganked, has a pretty strong edge. If you just hold 3 towers more than your opponent does, you win (obviously). So you control mid, don't overpush, play defensively, and force the enemy to come into your fortified position. Back and heal/buy after you kill them, and by the time they are respawned, you are re-entrenched, and have a gold/item advantage.

[Krill]

There is another option there. If you can kill them and then take the remaining two towers, you can hold them up in their base. If you can do this for a minute you can knock off over 100 nexus hp. If you play the slow and steady game, but make a mistake towards the end of the game you can end up losing via this tactic.