What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
Welcome back to Removed Abilities, turns out there’s quite a lot of these hidden gems
from the old days of League of Legends so we’ve looked through and picked out another
bunch of our favorites.
Some of these abilities are crazy overpowered so it’s probably a good thing that they
were removed, but it’s good fun to look at them and think how they would affect the
game if they still existed today.
As always we’d love to get your feedback so make sure you leave us a comment, and
if you like the video hit that like button, if not then hit the dislike, and if we reach
1000 likes I’ll go make myself a sandwich!
Anyways, let’s get started.
First on our list Shaco, with his old Q called Maniacal Cloak.
This ability was the old form of Shaco’s Deceive, but instead of being a one time cast
that stealthed him then went on cooldown, it instead was a toggle on/off ability that
consumed 15 mana per second.
This was probably a good chance just because almost permanent stealth is never going to
be good for the game, but in the trade-off we got Shaco’s own personal flash which
sets him up for some of the craziest escape, invades and jukes possible in League.
It was balanced by the mana drain, so you’d have to deactivate it sometimes or risk running
completely oom, but that’s still a pretty low trade-off for the amount of power you
would get from being permanently stealthed.
You could pretty much act like permanent stealth by just toggling Maniacal Cloak on while moving
between brushes, turning it off to save mana while you set up traps, so it was pretty abusable.
Maniacal Cloak would have been super frustrating to play against because Shaco would be able
to take all the time he needed to set up his boxes and aim for Backstabs, so forcing him
to play a bit fairer with only a short period of stealth and a cooldown before it could
be used again was definitely a healthy change overall, well, if you can even call Shaco
healthy in the first place that is.
Taric is up next with his original ultimate Radiance.
Not one to be outdone when it comes to being fabulous, Taric would emit a brilliant light
that would heal himself and nearby allies over time, up to 50 base health per second
but scaling with his ability power.
The cool thing is that this isn’t one of those ‘activate and it heals over 3 seconds’
type deals, Radiance was actually a toggle too, so he could activate it and leave it
on until he had no mana left.
It became more expensive to keep on the longer it was active, kinda like Anivia’s Ultimate,
but you’d only need maybe 5 seconds of permanent healing to completely break a teamfight and
nullify all the damage and enemy team would deal.
The range on it was actually pretty insane, at a 550 units radius it was even further
than a flash in terms of the AoE, so keeping allies in heal range would be pretty easy
to do.
Riot have a kind of policy to try avoid direct healing abilities where possible because they
are so anti-fun to deal with, so they tend to use barriers or other temporary measure
instead, so it’s not that surprising that Taric would lose this Ultimate for something
that was a bit easier to play around.
The first properly crazy overpowered ability today has gotta be Twisted Fate’s old Pick
A Card though.
A lot of people know about his old aoe gold card, but here are the finer details.
Blue card would give 60 bonus damage on your next attack and let you pick another card.
Red attacks would explode, dealing damage in an area for up to 125 base magic damage
with a 1.5 second slow.
Gold cards would deal up to 250 base magic damage in an area and stun everyone for 1.5
seconds.
Yes, you heard me right.
Why would you ever choose red card for half the damage and a slow rather than double the
damage and a stun?
Well, you never would.
You could chain blue cards for consistent DPS because they let you pick more cards,
but you would never choose red because it was basically useless compared to the gold
card.
Twisted Fate’s old gold card was super broken, and you could just stun and burst out entire
groups of enemies without really needing to do much.
It’s an auto-attack enhancement after all so you can’t miss it, so all you needed
to do was pick a Gold card and then aim for the enemy champion in the middle of the group.
Honestly this is probably one of the most busted abilities that ever existed, but fortunately
it was changed to single target to both nerf it’s effectiveness and make red card a little
bit more valuable, since that change made it the only AoE effect.
Since we’re talking overpowered, how about the old version of Karthus’s passive, Death
Defiled.
We know and love Karthus as a lich mage that sticks around after death to dish out some
pain for an extra 6 seconds.
Well, that would be kinda broken if it was 10 seconds, and it would be even more broken
if he could literally respawn himself instantly at his base if he killed an enemy champion.
Well, that’s exactly what he used to do, and it was incredibly busted.
Instant revives were pretty untouched territory outside the old summoner spell, and Karthus
players loved it so much that running Revive on Karthus became a pretty normal thing to
do right up until it was axed from the game.
It’s super punishing to spend all the effort and resources to kill someone only for them
to pop back up again and get straight back into the fight, so it’s definitely a good
thing that it was removed - both from Karthus’ passive, and as a summoner spell overall.
The biggest downside would be accidentally killing someone right after you died, so that
you would respawn and not have time to dish out more damage in a teamfight, but even with
that trade-off the power in a free respawn is way too good to have a place in the game.
Remember dodge?
We’ve talked about it a few times as an old removed game mechanic that gave you a
chance to avoid basic attacks.
Turns out Sivir used to have a ton of dodge chance too, and she got it for free from her
passive Fleet of Foot.
It increased her dodge chance by up to 25% while moving, so 1 in 4 basic attacks would
miss her completely.
This kind of ability really rewards players that can kite or ‘orbwalk,’ and it pretty
much just acted like ‘Sivir avoids 25% of all damage from AD Carries.’
at the time.
Dodge was eventually removed because it’s just way too noninteractive as a mechanic,
and the only place you can really find it anymore is the ‘100% dodge chance’ equivalent
that Jax gets while using Counterstrike.
Putting it on an ADC where most damage is going to be dealt in duels with basic attacks
is pretty game breaking, and although it took a while to scale up to the full 25% at higher
levels, even just occasionally avoiding a basic attack could often be all it takes to
turn a fight around in such high DPS combat.
At maxed level with full items, AD Carries can probably kill each other in two hits,
maybe three.
With that in mind, a 25% dodge chance is huge because it’s incredibly likely that you’d
get one good dodge off in a duel and just destroy the enemy ADC.
Last up today is Ashe’s old E, Plentiful Bounty, also known as Accumulate Wealth.
By far the weakest ability on our list, it gave Ashe bonus gold depending on what level
the ability was, every time she killed a unit.
Yeah, that’s all it did.
Don’t get us wrong, free gold is a lovely thing to have, but it needs to be either as
a passive effect or stapled to another ability such as with Gangplank’s Q to actually be
worth having.
Taking up an entire ability slot just for some bonus gold is pretty boring and it was
quickly replaced with Hawkshot in Season 1, Ashe’s trademark vision control ability.
She did keep the bonus gold portion as a passive on her Hawkshot for quite a long time though,
although the numbers were tweaked a few times.
The gold generating passive lasted all the way until Season 5 when Ashe received her
rework, so it stuck around in some form for a pretty long time before it was eventually
removed, so either though it was kinda weak, it earned itself a mention.
At least we still have one AD Carry with a gold-generating ability, Draven, and let’s
be real, he definitely suits it better!
That wraps up this part of our series on removed abilities, make sure you check out parts 1
or 2 for tons more crazy mechanics and spells that were actually a part of the live game,
and let us know in the comments which ability you think was the best and why!
We’ll keep digging up more of these but for now it looks like that’s gonna be it
from me, if you enjoyed the video drop a like, subscribe if you want, thanks for watching,
and I’ll see you guys next time!