What’s the difference between Ability Haste and CDR in League of Legends?

Riot bid a fond farewell to Cooldown Reduction (CDR) in League’s 2021 preseason and introduced Ability Haste, a new and improved version of the stat.

CDR was a stat that reduced the cooldown of your champion’s abilities or the amount of time before an ability can be used again after activation. This was determined by a percentage and was granted by items like Luden’s Echo, buffs like the Blue Sentinel’s Crest of Insight, and runes like Transcendence.

CDR capped at 40 percent and could only increase beyond this point—to 45 percent—with the Cosmic Insight rune. The more CDR you had, the more valuable it became. At 10 percent CDR, you’d cast 11 percent more times, while at 40 percent CDR, you’d cast 66 percent more times.

Ability Haste, though, is more “flexible,” according to Riot, and can create “clearer build choices,” while still filling the purpose of letting you cast abilities more often.

Ability Haste provides a linear power scaling model for more ability casts. Ten Ability Haste will equal 10 percent more abilities cast, 20 ability haste will equal 20 percent more abilities cast, and so on. This makes it so every point of Ability Haste you buy has the same impact, rather than an exponential one.

CDR’s “multiplicative scaling” was so powerful that Riot had to have a 40 percent cap to limit its power. With the new linear scaling model with Ability Haste, the game no longer needs this restriction. This opens up some new build options that sacrifice other power to double down on casting. In other words, Ability Haste is uncapped.

“You should have the potential to reach the same frequency of spell-slinging, but the way you get there will be more linear,” Riot says.

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