[2019] Here’s why league can’t (or at least should not) announce dragons in champ select:

“(Last paragraph is my main point)

In the past few months on this sub, one of the most frequent suggestions I’ve seen made is that riot announce elemental dragons in champion select. The principle argument for this change is that it would reduce rng in league by giving players a better chance to make picks based off of the dragons.

Today I saw a post about the insane amounts of armor you can get with rammus or malphite and mountain drake. A couple days ago I saw another post which was showing the highest winrate champs with specific souls. The statistics indicated that both rammus and malphite (to continue the same example) had well over 90% wr with mountain soul, which makes sense. Before getting too excited about these admittedly absurd winrates, I do think it is important to make clear that getting any soul both contributes to and evidences a pretty serious lead over the enemy team, so these winrate’s do seem a little more inflated than they actually are. While my initial thought was that this was a perfect example of rng deciding games, and therefore yet another great reason for riot to announce drakes in champs select, I ultimately realized that this is in fact the exact reason why riot cannot do this.

Champions like rammus and malphite (and I am sure there are plenty more) are already generally situational picks chosen to counter ad teams. Announcing dragons in champ select would push these champs winrates through the roof and force riot to balance them around these dragons. This would furthermore have the effect of making these champs functionally useless in matches when their dragons do not spawn. There are undoubtedly other serious concerns which prevent riot from making this much desired requested change, such as games becoming totally dependent on winning dragons as both teams pick champs based off the dragon which only one team can win, but what I just explained seemed the clearest example of a potentially disastrous consequence of this change.

Ultimately, while I do think that dragons as they stand take rng too far, and are pretty op besides, I think its important to realize that there are reasons not to announce dragons in champs select which merit more serious consideration.”