Ability Haste and Cooldown Reduction – What’s The Difference?

During the LoL pre-season 11 announcement, we learned some pretty impressive details, specifically about a new stat called Ability Haste. Ability Haste is similar to cooldown reduction as it affects the number of times a player can cast a spell. Soon, this new stat is going to replace cooldown reduction, and new features will be added that could change how your mains are played. 

That’s right, with the start of Pre-season 11, you’re no longer going to have cooldown reduction. In its place, you will have Ability Haste, which will reduce the cooldown on those champion abilities. When you compare cooldown reduction to ability haste, the problem here is that ability haste isn’t as intuitive to understand. 

10% cooldown reduction makes sense intuitively. Since your ability’s cooldown is 10% less, this will leave you with 90% of the original cooldown. Looking at it this way, calculating CDR is a whole lot easier. However, when it comes to ability haste, it’s hard to understand exactly how much a point of ability haste is going to reduce the cooldown on your abilities. 

Also read: How to Get Maximum Ability Haste?

How Much Ability Haste Can a Player Have? 

One of the main reasons as to why Riot decided to make such changes is due to the fact that the declining effectiveness of ability haste allows them to uncap the stat. Being able to uncap the stat means that your champion can have as much Ability Haste in their build as possible. 

Let’s say you get 100 ability haste; this would mean that you will have a 50% cooldown reduction, which is more than what you would get with the old system. So the question is, is it possible to get 100 ability haste in your build? 

Surprisingly, the answer to that question is yes. In fact, not only is it possible for you to get 100 ability haste in your build, but it’s also not hard. On average, when an item has ability haste, it will have between 15-20 ability haste. However, many items only have 10, but you’ll also find a fair amount of items with 25-30 ability haste. If you were to get two items with 15 ability haste, you would have the equivalent of a 20-30% cooldown reduction. 

If you’d like to build up your ability haste, that’s possible. Between items and runes, it will be possible for you to reach 200 ability haste. This is the equivalent to around 66.7% cooldown reduction.

How Do I Know How Much Cool Down Reduction I Have? 

Changing the change in cooldown reductions to added haste, it’s apparent that ability haste has a link to cooldown reduction. If you’re having some trouble moving from cooldown reduction to ability haste, take a look at this conversion guide:

• 10% CDR = 10 AH
• 20% CDR = Approximately 25 AH
• 30% CDR = Approximately 40 AH
• 40% CDR = Approximately 70 AH
• 50% CDR = 100 AH
• 60% CDR = 150 AH

Is This Change Going to have an Impact on How Much CDR We Get?

No. If you follow a similar build path to what you have been doing, then you’re going to get the equivalent amount of AH to give you the cooldown reduction you would have usually obtained. Like we said before, it’s pretty easy to get 10-20% CDR because this is something you can get off of one or two items. 

However, if you find yourself needing more cooldown reduction, you’re going to have to pay attention to your items. Let’s say you get six items, and all of them have the median amount of CDR; you will end up with approximately 60 Ability Haste, which is a little under 40% CDR. Yes, Ability Haste is on many items, but there’s not a whole lot of them that will give you more than 20 ability haste.

Also read: Worst League of Legends Skins

What’s the Difference Between Ability Haste and Cool Down Reduction? 

A simple comparison to help understand Ability Haste is that it’s just like Armor / MR. You can get as much of it as you want and the value is always the same.

More armor -> more physical reduction
More ability haste -> more casts per minute

— Mark Yetter (@MarkYetter) August 7, 2020

Long story short, ability haste is much more flexible and can create more explicit build choices than CDR.

CDR is a stat that reduces the amount of time before you can use your ability again after it has been activated. The amount of time you have to wait is determined by a percentage as well as items.

CDR is capped at 40 percent and can only increase to 45 percent if the Cosmic Insight Rune is used. The more CDR you manage to get, the more value it will have. If you have 10 percent CDR, this means you will be able to cast 11 more times. On the other hand, if you have 40 percent CDR, you will be able to cast a total of 66 percent more times. 

On another note, you have Ability Haste, and according to Riot, this is more flexible. Also, with AH, you will be able to create more transparent build choices while casting your abilities more often. 

Cooldown reduction’s multiplicative scaling was super strong…it was so strong that Riot had to limit its power to a 40 percent cap. However, with Ability Haste, the game no longer needs this limitation. With that said, you will have new build options to choose from. 

There are numerous differences between ability haste and cooldown reduction. The most significant difference would have to be the fact that the two stats scale differently. AH works linearly, and what this means is that at all values, it’s still going to have the same effect. CDR, on the other hand, works exponentially, which means you can keep getting more CDR, making it more valuable. 

As we previously mentioned, AH is going to be uncapped. Of course, you’re not going to go for a 100% CDR as this isn’t possible, but you can work yourself up to some pretty crazy values. If you’re the type that wants to cast fast, then you’re going to be able to. 

Conclusion

So there you have it, the difference between ability haste and cooldown reduction is in the way they scale. Don’t worry; your gameplay isn’t going to get tossed in the dumps – we have a feeling LoL players are going to enjoy this change made by Riot.