The League of Legends 2021 preseason will bring many changes, especially to the in-game items. Riot's recent article revealed that they will completely change the Cooldown Reduction stat to Abilty Haste.
Cooldown Reduction has been one of the most important stats in League of Legends which allows the players to shorten the cooldowns of their champion's abilities.
Riot Games have revealed that they are working on a new CDR change that will add more flexibility to the stat and enable a broader variety of build paths. They will even change the name of the stat from Cooldown Reduction to Ability Haste.
At the moment, CDR's power grows exponentially which means that the stat becomes more valuable the more it's stacked. As explained by Riot, 10 per cent CDR results in 11 per cent more casts, while 40 per cent CDR gives 66 per cent more casts.
Compared to CDR, Ability Haste's power stacking will be much more linear. For example, 10 per cent of Ability Haste will result in 10 per cent more casts, 20 per cent Haste will give 20 per cent more casts, etc. This means that each amount of the Haste stat you buy will have the same impact.
It should be noted that the shift from CDR to Haste won't be 1:1 because that would be a pretty big nerf. Riot's intention with this change is to give more depth when it comes to choosing the right playstyle. This will enable some champions to play with very low cooldowns by going for a Haste-stacked build, even if they have to give up some AD or AP in the process.
Riot Games
The biggest upside to this change is that Ability Haste will most likely be uncapped which wasn't a case with CDR which had to be limited to 40 per cent thanks to its exponential value growth.
Balancing this new stat shouldn't be too hard considering that most of the other similar ones like Armour and Magic Resistance, work in the same way.
