League of Legends: Smolder's Original Ability Would Have Broken The Game
Riot August recently shared some insights into Smolder and some scrapped ideas behind his kit. One of them would have broken Riot and League of Legends.
Since his release earlier this year, Smolder has been a constant hot topic. At first, he was weak, but then his scaling late game playstyle started to truly establish itself in professional play and solo queue. But, as with every champion, there were a lot of iterations and ideas floating around which altered the way the champion looks and feels.
One of the original concepts for the champion was so insane that it would have broken an entire department at Riot Games.
League of Legends: Smolder Could Have Broken The Riot Art Department
Smolder went through some design changes before the champions team came up with the scaling "baby dragon grows up" idea they had. Recently, lead designer on League of Legends, Riot August, revealed that Smolder had some pretty interesting mechanics before.
One of the scrapped version of the tiny dragon would have meant he was related to whichever dragon owned the rift in that specific game. The champion would have gotten a unique bonus Q depending on the rift of the game. This idea was revealed to have from Riot Twin Enso who also worked on Sett, Akshan and Naafiri.
According to Riot August, Smolder's Q would have been an explosion with Infernal Rift. With Ocean Rift it would have been a slow and with Chemtech some form of poison. The idea was great and unique, but ultimately scrapped because the ability would have required a lot of art resources, which were too dependent on RNG.
Riot Twin Enso also wrote about this on Twitter/X stating that "it was really, really cool in testing, but it would have demolished the art department for a year". This could have been a pretty cool idea and concept, but unfortunately it would have broken the game, so we got the scaling little dragon instead. Maybe a similar concept can be added in the future though?
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