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Sammas said:
Ok, I get it now. Extremely unintuitive, since if you try to rationalise it by saying that you get the benefits of stoneskin in your turn (vs retaliations) so that initial turn should use up a 'turn', yet downpour also provides benefits in your turn, yet lasts the full 3 opponent turns.
Put simply, the symbol 'turn' refers to different things, with regards to those 2 abilities.
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Well, I don't think it means 2 different things at all, and I'm not trying to rationalize anything. A turn is a turn, always.
The problem comes with saying that "Duration:2" means "this ability lasts for 2 full turns from the time it was given", which isn't the case.
The tutorial and manual both say that all duration timers on a player's units are reduced by one during the Expiration Phase at the end of that player's turn.
Under this system, in order to have a friendly-targeting ability last through 1 of your opponent's turn, you have to give it Duration:2. If you give it Duration:1, it will go away at the end of your turn (just like Second Wind or Levitate does.)
I looked into all sorts of ways to implement this system when designing LOL, and all other systems were even more confusing, believe it or not. You have to have an expiration phase to reduce these timers *sometime*, and this was, all things considered, the option that caused the least confusion, especially given that most status effects are debuffs appied to enemies.
Let's say I put the expiration phase at the beginning of the turn instead. Then, if you gave an enemy a Duration:1 debuff (like, say, -1 Skill or something), it would go away at the beginning of their turn and wouldn't have had any effect, except for the short period remaining in your turn. It's basically the same 'problem', but would affect enemy debuffs instead friendly buffs. When weighing the options, I found the current system the least confusing, especially since there are more enemy debuffs than friendly buffs.
FWIW, any other turn-based strategy game that has both timed friendly buffs and timed enemy debuffs will have the same 'problem'. But other games usually have so much information flying around, and effects that matter less in the scheme of things, that their expirations often go unnoticed...
-Hiro_Antagonist