What is ability haste in League of Legends and how does it work?

William Davis Published 06/10/2020

As part of the 2021 preseason item overhaul, Riot is getting rid of the cooldown reduction (CDR) stat and replacing it with the new ability haste.

Riot’s goal for Season 11 is to enable greater flexibility in how players cast their abilities more often and to give clearer build options. To avoid unnecessary confusion, Riot has chosen to rename cooldown reduction to ability haste.

The rework has still left people wondering how ability haste is different from CDR, so we will give a short rundown of the new stat before it hits the live servers.

What is ability haste in LoL?

Just like CDR, ability haste is a stat in LoL that will enable players to cast more of their abilities per minute depending on how much ability haste they have. The big difference is that ability haste does not have a cap, meaning that players can reach a very high number if they dedicate their build to it.

Ability haste also scales differently. CDR scales at an exponential rate, which means that the stat becomes more valuable with the more a player has. This is why there has always been a cap on CDR.

Ability haste is different in that it has a linear scaling curve and will therefore each added amount of the stat will have a more consistent impact. The way ability haste scales can be compared to armor and magic resist.

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

How does ability haste work?

Ability haste makes the seconds on a cooldown go by faster for each point of the stat, whereas CDR takes a percentage of the cooldown away. This changes the way that players will have to calculate these stats while playing, but it will definitely take some getting used to.

For example, if a player has 25 ability haste, the seconds of each ability’s cooldown will count down 25% faster. In this case, it means that 1 second will equal 0.75 seconds with the ability haste added. If the original cooldown of the ability was 10 seconds, it would now be down to 8 seconds with 25 ability haste.

Which items provide ability haste?

As mentioned by lead gameplay designer Mark “Scuffy” Yetter, the ultimate goal is to make builds more flexible while keeping the average ability haste on champions the same as when CDR was in the game.

Our goal when tuning the move from CDR to Ability Haste is that there is on average the same amount of Cooldown Reduction on champs.

The upside (and why we’re doing it) is that build flexibility is dramatically better and there are more choices around haste vs non haste builds.
— Mark Yetter (@MarkYetter) August 7, 2020

The goals for the stat means that a lot of new items will include ability haste, here are some of the most significant ones.

Sunfire Aegis
Frostfire Gauntlet
Berserker Suit
Duskblade of Draktharr
Prowler’s Claw
Liandry’s Anguish
Luden’s Tempest
Everfrost
Hextech Rocketbelt
Axamuk’s Folly
Night Harvester
Trinity Force
Goredrinker
Stridebreaker
Divine Devourer

Riot has presented more than 30 complete items that include ability haste, so there will be plenty of different build paths to aim for. This means that ability haste will likely be one of the most popular stats in the game and something that many champions will end up building.

The new ability haste stat is currently available for testing on the Public Beta Environment (PBE).

William Davis

About William Davis

View full profile