Elder Dragon

Dragon types:

Chemtech Drake,

Cloud Drake,

Hextech Drake,

Infernal Drake,

Mountain Drake,

Ocean Drake,

Elder Dragon.

For information about the Dragon buffs, including Elder Dragon's, see Dragon Slayer.

The Elder Dragon is an epic monster on Summoner's Rift. It is located in the Dragon pit and is the most powerful of all dragons. The strength of its reward is meant to rival Baron Nashor's.

Killing an Elder Dragon grants Aspect of the Dragon to all living teammates for 150 seconds.

Features[edit source]

Passives[edit source]

Resistant Skin: Dragons are immune to all crowd control, except stasis. Additionally, Dragons' stats cannot be modified by any means.
Ancient Grudge: Elemental Dragons gain 20% bonus damage and 7% damage reduction per stack against enemies with Dragon Slayer stacks, up to 80% bonus damage and 28% damage reduction at 4 stacks.
Dragon Breath: Dragons deal bonus physical damage equal to 5% of the target's current health with their basic attacks, modified to 4% for the Chemtech Drake. Additionally, Dragons gain 30% armor penetration.

Abilities[edit source]

Taking Flight: Dragons knock back all enemies within 550 units of them upon starting the fight, displacing them further based on proximity and not through terrain.

Notes[edit source]

Dragons' basic attacks cannot be dodged nor negated by spell shields.
Dragons cannot damage other monsters.
If the team that slays a dragon has a lower average level than that of their opponents, they receive 25% bonus experience per average level difference. The bonus experience is sharply increased for the lowest level members of the team, equal to 15% per number of levels behind the dragon squared, up to a maximum of 200%.

Strategy[edit source]

Killing dragons is one of the main tasks of the Jungler. Junglers often require assistance from their team for this task, and the champions best positioned to provide this assistance are usually the mid laners and bottom laners.
When a team attempts to kill a dragon it usually gets weakened during the fight. Given the nature of the dragon pit, the team attempting the kill has limited escape paths. For this reason it's usually a good idea to gank the enemy team when they're trying to kill a dragon. A good gank may score several kills, steal the dragon kill, or both.
Dragons (and other epic monsters) should be finished with effects that instantly deal a high amount of damage (i.e. Smite, Cho'Gath's Feast, Nunu's Consume) to prevent the enemy team from stealing the kill.
When initially attacked, dragons will knock back every nearby champion, and begin attacking and chasing the closest champion. Attacking the dragon from a safe distance to get it to attack an unprepared enemy champion can be useful.

Tips to prepare dragon ganks[edit source]

Have a ward in the river close to the dragon camp entrance, providing complete vision of the pit. This will reveal enemies attempting to kill the dragon while also spotting enemies standing guard at the entrance. Killing the Rift Scuttler is a good way to provide vision in front of the dragon pit, but it does not provide vision inside the pit itself.

Tips to prevent dragon ganks[edit source]

Use a Control Ward or Oracle Lens to check for wards before attempting to kill a dragon, do not destroy wards unless you absolutely must eliminate their vision.
Eliminate the bottom lane enemies and then attack the dragon with the help of your bottom lane teammates. The enemy middle lane and jungler are usually not strong enough to fight three champions at once.
While on the red team, lure the dragon out of its pit. This makes the dragon chase you into the river, making it harder for the enemy team to steal it by engaging over the wall of the dragon pit.

Benefits of Dragon Slayer[edit source]

The stacking buffs provided by Dragon Slayer grant powerful effects which boost the overall strength of champions that are empowered by them.

Chemtech Drake's buff grants a team greater resistance to the effects of crowd control as well as greater effectiveness when they receive healing or shielding effects. These bonuses allow for a team to have more uptime in a fight against crowd control and recover faster from and/or mitigate more damage taken with any heals and shields they get.
Cloud Drake's buff speeds up a team as they move across the map faster than their enemies can. It gives a team enough time to head towards an important objective and gain control over it. The decreased slow effectiveness also helps with outrunning a chase.
Hextech Drake's buff greatly increases the attack output of a team as their cooldowns come up quicker and their attacks come out rapidly.
Infernal Drake's buff becomes more and more effective as a game continues as a team builds up their stats, with the buff giving even more stats which in turn leads to a massive boost in attack power.
Mountain Drake's buff toughens up a team and allows them to take more extended fights, making it difficult for the opposition to deal with.
Ocean Drake's buff restores tons of health after having taken lots of damage. It is particularly useful for taking down an objective after a skirmish as the team will restore their health overtime and be healthy in time for the next fight.

Trivia[edit | edit source]

A layer of Elder Dragon's roar came from using a violin bow across chicken wire and a trashcan.^[1]
If Baron Nashor and Elder Dragon have a 1v1 fight at Baron pit, Baron Nashor will lose.^[2]
- Elder Dragon's HP regen is so high (250 HP per second) that Baron can't even deal damage to it.

References

Units

[1] Dragon SFX Development

[Ask_Riot:Dragon_vs_Baron-2] Ask Riot: Dragon vs Baron

[1]

[2]

Interrupts:	Interrupts attack windups (excluding uncancellable windups), all channeled and charged abilities and all dashes and displacements. Units that are being knocked up will be placed on the ground, but aren't knocked down (the airborne status is not removed in this case).
Reduction:	The duration is unaffected by Tenacity.
Resist:	Resisted by crowd control immunity, displacement immunity, and Dr. Mundo's Goes Where He Pleases. Epic monsters and turrets are special cased to be affected by stasis despite them being crowd control immune.
Removal:	Cannot be removed by any means (except through death), and will prevent the activation of abilities that would usually remove crowd control effects. Quicksilver will either be placed on a short cooldown, remain usable, or become disabled.

Interrupts:	Interrupts attack windups (excluding uncancellable windups), and all channeled and charged abilities. The accompanying displacement overrides all other previous displacements, including dashes and other airborne effects.
Reduction:	The duration of airborne and its forced movement execution time is unaffected by Tenacity.
Resist:	Resisted by crowd control immunity, displacement immunity, and Dr. Mundo's Goes Where He Pleases.
Removal:	The forced movement that is applied alongside airborne effects cannot be removed by cleanses, which innately disables attacking and moving and can be overridden by dashing, blinking or lunging. Cleansing effects, with the exceptions of Milio's Breath of Life, Cleanse, Mikael's Blessing, and Quicksilver, remove the airborne status effect.