With a total of four different options presented to you, it was inevitable that at least one of League of Legends 'Dragon Souls' Tenth Season of competition would be out of tune with the rest.
In this guide, we're going to take a look at each of the four Dragon Souls and rank them from best to worst.
Ocean Drake
Being the only Drake to immediately require gameplay adjustment, it seems obvious that Ocean is the most changeable game of the bunch. A 3% (formerly 5) missing health recovery rate every 5 seconds is nothing to swallow, and passive regeneration keeps your team going through combat and staying on the map longer.
The Dragon Soul version of the Ocean Drake is largely the same, but with an active element; your champion regenerates a fixed amount of health and mana each time you deal damage to an opponent, increasing in proportion to your combat stats. This applies in smaller amounts when fighting with neutral monsters, and generally presents a huge boon for squishy staves and tanks with questionable mana reserves.
Ocean Dragon Soul's insane amount of raw sustain is often overwhelming, and when you incorporate Ocean Drake's persistent stacks on top of it, the opposing team will have a hard time taking sustained fights or even trades.
Drake infernal
Renowned for being the best Drake to have both early and late in the game, thanks to the raw combat stats it provides (5% bonus attack damage and potency per stack), Infernal's Dragon Soul is also combat-oriented. Much like the single stacks of the Drake itself, the Dragon Soul increases damage dealt.
Rather than being strictly stat-driven, the Infernal Dragon Soul is essentially a watered-down version of the old Elder Dragon buff. An attack booster of physical or magical damage, it turns every attack and ability into a miniature area of effect, with a solid amount of base damage greatly increased by combat stats.
The effect doesn't end the game, but should be more than enough to push your winning team over the edge when it comes to taking on team fights and skirmishes. At the end of the day, however, no amount of damage can make up for weakness in composition and the like, so while the Infernal Dragon Soul is incredibly useful, he's still second behind Ocean.
Mountain Drake
In Season 9, Mountain Drake dealt additional actual damage to neutral objectives and enemy structures. This season, however, the buff gives flat resistances. This makes all of your team members harder to kill and provides a bit more leniency in building paths for more loyal champions - for example, with guaranteed extra resistances, your tanker teammates might choose to just build health instead.
Resistances are both underrated and after the fact for a reason, given the number of detailed answers and champion kits to tanker builds. However, the Mountain Dragon Soul provides a massive boon in the form of a Malphite-Passive-Esque Shield. Every 5 seconds that you take no champion damage (it should be noted that this will apply again when you kite an enemy, as you are theoretically not taking any damage despite being in combat), a shield heavy enough refreshes your champion.
This buff allows squishies to be a bit more carefree with their positioning, and helps negate some of the potential for shattering and frontal assassination that many meta-compositions and champions have.
Disappointing, but still incredibly useful at times, Mountain Dragon Soul ranks perfectly in our third place. Additional padding is fine, but if your team is far enough ahead that they are able to secure four Elemental Drakes, the shield is unlikely to be strictly necessary.
Cloud Drake
Cloud Drake is incredibly difficult to assess, due to the fact that the stats he offers are often somewhat ineffective in team fight scenarios, which are usually league games come down to.
The stats that the Drake itself gives - further reduction in cooldown of your ultimate ability, ignoring the cooldown reduction cap - are almost always useful, as you can theoretically fight more often. This is very useful in heavy skirmish compositions, but if the enemy team is wise or respectful, you still only use an ultimate ability once per fight.
Cloud Dragon Soul has the old Drake effect - bonus movement speed, but lingering this time in combat - combined with the ancient rune Nimbus Cloak, granting extra speed on the ultimate cast. The effect synergizes with the Cloud Drakes' stacking passive, but we still have a hard time seeing it as game-defining. Additional acceleration can indeed help most champions find - or escape - their targets more easily, but compared to the bigger guns of the Dragon Souls, Cloud falls flat again.
