League of Legends Dev Tracker

He's still supposed to build tank for sure; that's the point. He takes 10% increased damage because his kit is built to be a powerful initiator in 5v5 fights and that is far more accessible in an ARAM situation. I took a peek at his win rate in ARAM, and its been oscillating a half a percent under 50% for several patches now on the tank build. You are supposed to play him as a tank. If you read that he takes an additional 10% damage, and that tells you to NOT play him as a tank, then you're going to have a far worse time in that game then if you just built tank items on him.

Mastery tokens are a system handled by a different team, so I can't speak with too much authority. However, best as I can tell, there are two reasons we wouldn't want them in ARAM:

1. The mastery system encourages you to play a single champion over and over. A lot of the fun of ARAM comes from getting random champions and just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what works. Trying to get mastery by just playing a given champ every time its up is antithetical to the intent of the mode
2. Mastery tokens are intended to be for players who want to master the skills of a specific champion and show it off. That is their primary audience and therefore its the one we want to make sure is best served by it. As with all merit-based awards, we have to be careful how freely we give them out otherwise it can end up cheapening the experience. I don't exactly think that getting a mastery token in ARAM is hugely problematic, but I want to respect the players who grinded to get m...

Adding it to rec items seems interesting. I hadn't thought of the glaive angle. I will say that people rarely build utility items in ARAM regardless of how good they are, so I'm dubious that it would make enough movement for people to feel better about traps (ie, umbral exists now but people still don't use it versus teemo/shaco). Item counterplay like this leads to fairly one dimensional outcomes; either you buy it and the trap champs can't do much or you don't and you get overwhelmed by traps (sweeper and grevious wounds are other examples of this). It works but the skill test is very low for very weak outcomes in our opinion.

Either way I'll talk to the team about it. Based on the feedback from this thread it seems like trap champ counterplay is up there in terms of current issues with ARAM. Happy to investigate at the very least.

We filled those in. Sorry it wasn't in the article. We did that super early on in the exploration when almost a whole different team was working on this.

I think Assassins with huge damage buffs are unfun to play against, but they certainly aren't powerful without them. We did an analysis of the roster, comparing their ARAM win rate and what we believe the win rate would be without the mods by assigning win rate values to 1% of each mod and then back calculating. In ARAM, assassins had something like a 40% AVERAGE win rate if we didn't have any mods on. The goal here is to find ways of making playing them not garbage but not have to give them tools like "one QE kills half their team"

they do!

We fixed those, btw.

Didn't we remove chemdrake after like a month into the year? We only put things in the game we have confidence in, so we want to make sure they have a fair shot. But if something is clearly not working, we will pull it.

there's slight differences that are hard to notice, but if it falls to the left, it leaves a small gap by the brush so you can sneak through it. If it falls to the right, the lane is closed off on that side.

Intended to be in the next balance patch. If its super egregious we'll hot fix it after we get the data we need.

Ideally we don't, but I'm suspecting in the cases of trap champions (teemo + shaco) we might have to. I'm more interested in fixing these champs specifically then say, trying to rework the vision mechanic of the whole map for just two champions.

We want to see how the map changes affect those two and I expect we'll follow up with changes for them.

It comes down to "what is the experience we want people to have?" In these cases, we're using Win Rate as a stand in for 'how likely is someone playing this champion able to contribute to winning the game,' which is in itself a stand in for 'did you get to do your thing and have fun?' Because you don't master a champ in ARAM the same way you do in SR, we want to make sure that people who are put on Akali for the first time aren't going to have literal zero fun. The win rate can be low for first game (and it is), but ARAM is a mode that more values just pick up and play rather than sweaty 'just get good.'

A lot of the changes were made with supporting melee characters in mind. The main goal of this being that melees are generally dis-favored due to the properties of Howling Abyss. The brush is a cool tool that melees can use, and hopefully the increased ability to play make will power them up in a more understandable way such that we don't need to gigabuff assassin damage.

We only gave energy buffs to champions who were either:
1. heavily modded, with the intent of removing some of those mods later -or-
2. underpowered.

Shen was neither, so we left him out. It made sense on some level, as his team fight output is more tied to his CDs than his energy levels, and he has a much easier time keeping energy up in 5v5s.

Trying to make champ by champ changes is fairly unsustainable, which is why we use this balance buff method. The good news about Ashe is she only has two abilities that have CDs affected much by the nerf, and both are VERY powerful on ARAM. We could get more nuance if we needed it, but for now we're still doing the science on figuring out what these new mods will be like

It's very possible (not easy), but it could be done. My issue is that I don't think the damage caused by the item is the big problem so much as stacking AH and slowing the enemy team every 2 seconds is. Mandate just enables you to do something while being super annoying and get a bunch of AH cheaper.

We tried it falling at various angles but unless it restricted player movement in this way the terrain just wasn't changing up the game. Most of the movement on howling abyss is towards or away from the Nexuses (Nexii?). Falling in the middle or at an angle didn't really create cool vision plays you could make.

We tried plants for quite awhile but they ended up not helping the vision game too much for a couple reasons:

• Plants were an objective that could be contested by the winning team. The plant positions had to be very specific where you could use them and the enemy couldn't take them, and if Teemo was shrooming up an area
• Plants were single use. Your ally wasting the plant felt REAL bad, especially if you know where a trap is that you want to remove and then they blow the plant on nothing
• Revealing the traps didn't do a whole lot. you still had to get there and kill it, which was fairly hard. We tried versions where the trap was either perma-revealed or destroyed, but it just negated what made traps interesting gameplay elements.

My guess is that once these new changes settle, we'll look at addressing trap champs like teemo and shaco directly rather than systemically changing the whole mode for just these two.

We could, but I don't actually think it solves the problem. In all cases Ashe maxes W and just fills the lane with slowing projectiles that make approaching a gigantic pain. We could change mandate so it did zero damage and people will still just spam W and be unassailable by melee classes. Actually targeting how often she can cast W I think has a better chance of doing the trick of reducing her reliance on W as opposed to auto attacks.

Also I think you underestimate how many people want to do weird stuff on ARAM. It's... wild in there.

if we removed it straight up the characters are just unplayable (some assassins have like a 30~% win rate without them. We're going to scale back how much we use the damage without it being super painful if you get stuck on any character.