Cooldown Scaling on Basic Abilities: 159 Never Shrink, Urgot's W Goes From 12s to 0

Across every champion, there are 501 basic abilities (Q/W/E, excluding ultimates). 159 of them, a little over 30%, don't get a single second shorter no matter how many ranks you put in. Urgot's W, Purge, goes the other way entirely: 12 seconds down to 0 at max rank.

What changes when you rank up a skill

Ranking up a skill usually means more damage or a bigger effect, but a lot of skills also get shorter cooldowns along the way. Q, W, and E each have five rank values, and each rank has its own cooldown number. Comparing the first and last value tells you how much a champion's kit actually rewards investing points in cooldown terms. We already covered ultimate cooldowns in an earlier piece, so this time it's just Q/W/E, all 501 of them.

The distribution peaks at 20-39%

The breakdown: 159 abilities at 0%, 42 at 1-19%, 192 at 20-39%, 97 at 40-59%, and 11 at 60% or more. The biggest group sits at 20-39%, with the zero-change group coming in second. The average reduction is 22.9%, so shaving off roughly a fifth of the cooldown by maxing a skill is basically the norm.

Biggest droppers, and they're not who you'd expect

Biggest cooldown drop	Cooldown
Urgot W Purge	12s→0s (100%)
Akshan W Going Rogue	18s→2s (89%)
Yasuo E Sweeping Blade	0.5s→0.1s (80%)
Ashe W Volley	18s→4s (78%)
Bel'Veth Q Void Surge	4s→1s (75%)

Max-rank Urgot W is close to spammable, and it carries the true-damage execute passive, so it makes sense the kit changes shape entirely once it's maxed. Among the eleven abilities at 60%+, you also get Soraka's W (Astral Infusion) and Vayne's Q (Tumble) — sustain and mobility tools seem to be exactly the kind of skill design meant to reward spamming.

And here's what never moves, no matter what

No change	Cooldown
Ahri Q Orb of Deception	flat 7s
Zed Q Razor Shuriken	flat 6s
Riven Q Broken Wings	flat 13s
Draven W Blood Rush	flat 12s
Twitch Q Ambush	flat 16s

Yasuo is the fun case here. His E, Sweeping Blade, has the third-biggest cooldown drop in the game, but his Q, Steel Tempest — the combo starter — never moves off 4 seconds. Same champion, wildly different design logic depending on the ability. Zed's and Riven's Q's follow the same pattern: the core combo tool tends to sit on a fixed cooldown.

Takeaway

Just ranking cooldown reduction wasn't interesting on its own, so we looked at both extremes instead. The flat-cooldown side tends to be a kit's core piece (a combo starter or sustained damage tool) that gets stronger purely through numbers going up, not through being cast more often. The steep-drop side tends to start out as a niche, high-impact skill where ranking it up changes how often you can actually use it. Once you look past the raw ranking and into the asymmetry inside a single kit, the numbers mean something different.

Finding out Yasuo's Q and E get treated this differently made me rethink how carelessly I've been leveling my skills