Should League of Legends Release New Summoner Spells?

What’s up guys it’s me Jeremy!
One of the things that really helped set League of Legends apart from DOTA in it’s early
days was the existence of summoner spells.
It was an original mechanic that added a lot of flexibility and gave players some tools
that they could use to deal with being hard countered by an enemy champion, and this helped
keep a lot of different champions viable.
For example, being up against a high burst assassin might be a death sentence for an
AP caster - but the existence of spells like Flash, Barrier and Exhaust can introduce ways
for players to potentially deal with those threats.
At the same time, summoner spells open up the ability to build on the strengths of your
champion - like giving bonus damage in the form of Ignite, or allowing you to quickly
reinforce other lanes using Teleport with a champion that is usually quite immobile.
Now we know that Riot can get pretty creative with the mechanics that they build into new
champions, so there is definitely the potential for them to do the same for summoner spells.
After all, we’ve had the current lineup for a long time, and that can lead to them
feeling quite stale.
There are only 10 spells available for use on Summoner’s Rift, and a couple of those
never see use.
Which leaves us with around 7-8 usable spells - one of which is pretty much always going
to be Flash or Ghost.
Riot has done a pretty good job giving each Summoner Spell a niche, competitive use, but
even so it can often feel like the list is extremely short, leaving a lot of room to
add some more value to the game.
And since you are kind of forced to take Flash or Ghost as one of your two, the actual amount
of options and decisions you have with summoner spells is really much more limited than it
looks on paper.
One of the most promising ways to introduce new summoner spells could be to go down the
role-exclusive path.
Currently the only true ‘role exclusive’ summoner spell is Smite, which is incredibly
powerful to the point where junglers will never run without it.
On the surface, Smite is pretty simple, giving junglers a way to finish off an objective
with one powerful spell.
However, Riot has used Smite as the foundation to build a lot of bonus, role-exclusive value
into the jungle position.
Because no other roles are going to use Smite, Riot can add in interactions for junglers,
without worrying about balancing them around other roles that might try and exploit one
of those mechanics.
The existence of these bonus Smite mechanics and jungler items that require you to have
smite has allowed jungling to become much more complex and diverse, making it a more
compelling gameplay experience without the risk of influencing other roles.
Now imagine if every role had it’s own summoner spell - it could lead to some really exciting
gameplay without some of the balance issues that can creep up as a result of other roles
abusing items or mechanics that weren’t intended for use by them.
Of course, whether these hypothetical new summoner spells were role-exclusive or just
fresh new mechanics for use by everyone, there are definite downsides that should be mentioned.
For starters, summoner spells have proven to be extremely difficult to balance.
In the past, summoner spells have undergone a ton of changes, and on multiple occasion
spells have been completely removed because Riot struggled to find a healthy place for
them in the game.
Although changes that prevent the game becoming stale are always welcome, that doesn’t mean
it’s a good idea to make changes for the sake of making changes, and that means any
new summoner spells ideally would need to provide an elegant solution that fills an
existing gap in the game.
Simply providing yet another alternate choice, probably won’t be good enough for the new
spell to succeed.
This ties in with another potential drawback - complexity.
Although this isn’t a huge issue for conventional summoner spells, any role-exclusive spells
would likely be either extremely important when it comes to success in that role, or
they would be interactive outside of just the spell itself - like being tied into role-exclusive
items for example.
Not only is that confusing for new players, but it would introduce massive shifts in focus
for players that are used to having a little more personal control over their playstyles.
Since Flash is almost too value to run without on most champions, role-exclusive summoner
spells would likely take away the pre-game choice of selecting that second summoner spell
completely, making the other current summoner spells pretty obsolete, kind of how they are
obsolete for junglers already.
You could technically argue that this is already the case, and that the existing spells already
feel mandatory in most situations.
Flash or Ghost are selected 95% of the time, and the rest of the time your role will already
usually decide which spell you’ll use - like Teleport on most top laners or Heal on an
ADC.
Typically only mid laners really have consistent decisions over which spell they want to use
alongside Flash, which is pretty bad considering summoner spells were created to give flexibility
in the first place.
Perhaps that means the problem lies more with the existing spells, rather than the lack
of new ones.
So far we haven’t really mentioned Riot’s stance on summoner spells, but we have a quote
from Ghostcrawler that really sums up my perspective on things and I definitely agree with him.
He mentioned that Riot would much rather have a small, equally viable pool of summoner spells
rather than loads of options that aren’t ever used.
It doesn’t matter so much to Riot that not every spell is a huge gamechanger like Flash
or Ignite, as long as the other spells are still relevant in the right circumstances.
Ghostcrawler went on to say that it’s definitely possible that one day someone will come up
with a great idea for a new summoner spell, but it would have to be good enough to compete
with the current lineup too.
Essentially he’s saying that Riot are open to the possibility in the future, but every
change on this scale does introduce a lot of risk so as a result, it’s not a big priority
for them - and besides, it won’t do anything to solve the current lack of diversity issues
anyway!
Now personally, I love what Riot has done with Smite, and the way the jungle role is
designed around it, and I’d love to see something similar happen to other roles, and
summoner might be a way to do that, but there are also other options to have that gameplay
without forcing summoner spells on a role, with support quests being an example of that.
So although there is a lot of untapped potential for summoner spells, it’s tough to say if
adding new ones is or isn’t the right call to expand the diversity of builds and playstyles.
But it does seem that Riot likely won’t be adding any new ones for quite some time.

Should League of Legends Release New Summoner Spells?

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