League of Legends: Draven First Impressions

Draven, The Glorious Executioner, was released today. From the various skill preview videos, along with Riot Game's official Champion Spotlight for the character, I found myself very interested in it. This interest transformed into a need to play Draven when my partner, Steve, pointed out that PC Gamer was challenging me."If you talk a big talk and think you’re hot stuff on the Fields of Justice, this is the champion to prove it with."

I don't necessarily talk big talk, but I like to think I'm pretty good at League of Legends. So I picked him up.  Because I found the original artwork to be a bit lacking, I purchased the double bundle and immediately fell in love with his skin. It's such a drastic change of tone for the Champion, going from looking relatively normal to looking like something out of Diablo 3 dunked in blue dye. This is by no means a complaint. He looks awesome. Here's his splash screen artwork:

Needless to say, he looks awesome. The skin comes with new (sort of - they have been modified a little to seem more demonic) voice files along with a couple of different animations for the trails of his axes. When you have a Character who's artistic focal point is their weapon, small tweaks like the particle effects can make a big difference. That's not the point though - the axes are totally different and he looks brilliant.

Now, onto how Draven plays. Draven is an Attack Damage Carry (if you don't know what this means, basically he is a champion who is fragile and attacks from range - if they do well they will generally end up dealing most of the damage in team fights and winning the game for their team) who, first of all, is male. Thank the lords above for this - in my opinion there are far too many female AD Carries who wear nothing but a bra and some panties and who wield a weapon about sixteen times larger than themselves. The only thing larger than their stupidly big weapons are their breasts. I'll say no more on the topic.

Second of all, Draven is hard. Very, very hard. His signature ability is "Spinning Axe". This is his Q button, and when used, he will begin to spin one of his axes in his hand. Besides this looking awesome, his next attack will deal a whole chunk of extra damage and ricochet off of the target towards Draven. A very visible marker will appear where this axe will land. If he catches it by being on the marker when it lands, he immediately begins spinning it and will throw it with his next auto attack. 

Below is an example of me running to catch a spinning axe as it bounces off of an enemy:

This means that, in order for Draven to do as much damage as he possibly can, he has to throw his axe at an enemy by right-clicking on them, move to where the axe will land, catch it, and then repeat this process. This gets even more advanced when you take into consideration his second axe. Since he has two axes, when one is flying in the air he can throw the other as his basic attack. In this regard he will always have an attack of some kind, even if his axes are in the air.

Yes, I just said "axes". This second axe can also become a spinning axe. This means that Draven can have two spinning axes at once. Needless to say, this can become very confusing very quickly. If he doesn't catch an axe, he will lose the ability to throw that spinning axe and that axe will become a basic attack until he uses his Q again. His Q has roughly a ten second cooldown, meaning that if you make a mistake early after you've got two spinning axes prepared, you'll go down to one, and after that you're reduced to just basic attacks.

This is bad for Draven; his basic attacks don't hit very hard. However, when he does hit with his spinning axes, he hits hard. Very hard. This means that he can very easily trade blows with enemy AD carries and come out ahead. One of the things I love about Draven's spinning axes are that you only have to - assuming you catch them all - cast the spell twice. Throwing and catching the axe costs Draven no mana, and as such he often has a lot of mana on reserve for his other attacks. This is, of course, assuming that you can catch them all. This is a lot harder than it seems, especially when combined with looking at the minimap, watching other players and moving about.

The design of the game is very smart in this regard; Draven's axes will choose where to land dependent on which direction you are currently going in. If you're chasing an enemy, they'll land in your path as if you had kept chasing them, and if you're running away, they move as if you wanted to keep running. This also applies for strafing across the side of a lane to avoid enemy skill shots. This means that Draven has to stay one step ahead of the enemy; if they're moving towards him to use a skillshot, he can throw an axe at them and then run, and the axe will land in a safe zone, allowing him to catch it easily.

This raises an interesting issue though; the axes do not cater for quickly switching directions. League of Legends if often a very twitchy game, especially early game. By that I mean players will often try to move forwards whilst the enemy moves backwards, and then turn around when the enemy moves towards them. This happens every 1-2 seconds when you're close to an enemy. Players do this so that they can harass the enemy with attacks that cannot be countered. So when you're playing Draven and you're constantly twitching backwards and forwards, when you do decide to try and get in more than one attack, you're going to have to commit pretty heavily or just let your axe fall. This is because the axe will assume you're chasing, which assumes that you're not harassing and you're aiming for a kill.

Below is a shot of Draven spinning both of his axes at the same time:

Draven's next ability, Blood Rush, massively increases his attack and movement speed for a couple of seconds. The cooldown for this ability is refreshed each time you catch a spinning axe, meaning that you can use it rapidly when throwing and catching axes. However, unlike spinning axes you have to use the ability over and over, costing you a lot of mana. As such you'll have to only use it repeatedly when going for kills. This bonus to attack and movement speed is huge, and is great for fighting one-on-one with an enemy, when you can rapidly catch axes. In theory it's great all the time when fighting enemy Champions, but keeping it up alongside catching spinning axes is incredibly difficult.

Next is "Stand Aside". This, along with his ultimate, is actually fairly simple. He throws his axes out in a line and everything hit is knocked to the side and slowed. It's great for initiating a fight, interrupting an enemy who is using a channelled spell or slowing enemies to get in range. Throwing it through an entire enemy team can stop a whole bunch of spells and even stop aggression.

Finally, his ultimate, "Whirling Death", throws his axes across the map, where they'll keep going until they hit an enemy champion, reach the edge of the map or Draven re-activates the skill, at which point they'll stop and reverse, coming back to Draven. This spell is brilliant for taking out the last chunk of an enemy's health or for hitting lots of enemies at once. This makes up for Draven's lack of area of effect abilities.

Here, have another screenshot:

Draven is incredibly hard to play. Unlike the Champion released prior to him, Darius, Draven has an incredibly high skill ceiling. By this I mean that it will take a lot longer to master his gameplay than it would to master another Champion's. The advantage of this, however, is that Draven can do a lot of damage when played correctly and consistently.
It's good to see Riot Games creating a Champion that seems to cater towards the higher end of skill for League of Legends. With its competitors DOTA 2 and Heroes of Newerth considered to have a generally higher skill cap, Riot's introduction of Draven is definitely showing - at least to me - that they're not afraid of making the game hard. There are a lot of Champions, I'm glad that some of them can be really hard whilst others can be much easier.

Draven's gameplay seems to cater to this professional crowd in almost every way; his character is snobby, egotistical and self-centred, and he is obsessed with making himself look good. His voice files have him gloating about how good he is, and he even has a unique perk - when he teleports back to base, he poses and may occasionally say a one-liner such as "Draven's making an exit". Him saying this right after the player has barely escaped an encounter will definitely make them feel like they've earned it.

I look forward to playing him more in the future, but only when I have the time and energy to concentrate heavily on winning. If you see a Draven in game, chances are they're in over their head or they're playing to win, hard.