Balance changes don’t come often. How early could we be seeing that power shaved off? Hotfix? After several patches? I only see akali being played by her mains in my games and these upcoming changes in addition to her current buffs sound awful to fight against when in the hands of an experienced player.
Intended to be in the next balance patch. If its super egregious we'll hot fix it after we get the data we need.
If you're targeting certain aspects of champs rather than % buffs/debuffs, would it be possible to target Teemo's waveclear specifically? That's what makes him so oppressive, if he's got a decent teamcomp to support him it's extremely difficult to stop him stalling out games indefinitely by spamming R in the middle of the lane.
I'd be fine if they buffed Teemo's damage to champs if they gutted his R damage to minions.
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.
I'm a little confused by the whole balancing of certain champs, when aram is literally a game mode where everyone has a random chance and random skill lvl with different champs, yet you balance by winrate. Akali is a high skilled champ which is obviously hard to master yet you buff the crap out of her despite majority of people who get her, having zero skill and knowledge of the champ. Basically she is much stronger than her winrate would indicate so when someone with some skill on her gets her in aram, they absolutely demolish.
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.'
Hi! Jumping on this to, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for the updates. It looks great and I am extremely looking forward to it (OMG ARAM CLASH I HOPE I DON'T WORK THAT WEEKEND).
A small note: The bottom pixel brush might be the only change that detracts from the experience rather than add to it. Currently, when there's a (damage boosted) assassin or hook champ on the enemy team, as a squishy it means you're playing the game on the bottom half of the map because due to the width of the lane, you cannot step up to that bush ever. It already happens with Ivern games that the map gets quite hard to contest if there's a fed assassin, the 2nd pixel brush might make it even harder. But I'm sure you'll be monitoring feedback, and I'm ready to be proven wrong! (just my 2 cents from over 10k ARAMs played on my account)
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.
on the topic of energy buffs why no shen?
obv he's fine but im curious if it has to do with him being a tank, or does him having 400 energy factor in?
mostly asking since he's the only energy user left out afaik
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.
What if we gave Ashe w a cooldown mechanic similar to yasuo/yone q or ksante q? As in her w cd would scale with AS so ADC Ashe would be fine but mandate Ashe would be nerfed. Would it even be possible to make this change only in aram?
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
Are there technical limitations to implementing damage nerfs with items? From what I understand, a lot of the difference in power from ADC/Poke ashe is that Mandate isn't affected by the damage nerf.
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.
why not have the tower fall down in the middle rather than to the side?
You can still make some fun fight dynamics but you aren't going to have scenarios which involves one single chokepoint.
Champions like Caitlyn who can put down traps will be busted.
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.
If they could add the plants like WR ARAM has, it would be a great QoL against those stealth champs.
We tried plants for quite awhile but they ended up not helping the vision game too much for a couple reasons:
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.
Can’t you just change the aura dmg buff/nerf to affect imperial mandate? That feels like a much healthier change than inherent ability nerfs…nobody wants to build mandate, but they’re forced to since the adc output is nerfed so much by the aura while imperial mandate itself is much less affected
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.
Please remove the damage buff overall it' so toxic to play against
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.
Do the turrets alway fall in the same fixed place?
there are two different directions the towers fall. The direction is chosen randomly and it's the same for each team. Either "up-ish" towards the brush or "down-ish" When it falls upwards, it leaves a small gap where you can go through it (so there are two approaches, one covered by brush), and when it falls downward it closes off that part completely.
Hextech Gate is ass remove this shit. Every time Riot looks at ARAM they make it worse.
At least play it first.
Doesn’t this also make it harder for the losing team to claw back, unless that was the intention (shortening ARAMs)? The narrow choke points also mean a pokey team will shut down pushbacks from the losing team. It’s akin to the winning team having a Teemo shutting town all push backs.
Speaking of Teemo, please please please consider adding the scryer effect on health pickups like in Wild Rift.
We've found its the opposite, actually. When you push past the terrain you have less room to run away and position that limits your options. We've paired these changes with an update to death timers to account for it when the game starts going long.
Is the goal to eventually show these changes in champ select? Would be the best change you could ever make because as it stands now having to use an external website to even see it beyond patch notes outside of ingame is not ideal.
There was contention around that, but we considered it. The balance buff changes give you the idea of how this character plays differently from their SR counterpart, but doesn't really give you a great idea of the power of the character in ARAM. Seraphine would have giga nerfs in champ select that makes it look like you're just never supposed to play seraphine, when in actuality she's still a (more than) reasonable pick in ARAM.
To more directly answer the question: We don't have any plans to do so right now, but we're always reassessing things like this.
The problem is having her damage gutted makes her feel atrocious to play with an actual ADC build so you’re even more forced to play the support build that everyone hates.
Yep. Once we get some data on the AH nerf, we’ll try and give her some damage back
Probably not entirely, I imagine they want to see how her winrate increases first, and then take away just as many damage buffs needed to bring her winrate back to what it was. She's currently +15/-15, maybe she can stay power neutral with tenacity and energy buffs, if her damage buffs get brought down to +8/-8
This is it exactly. We have a general idea of what win rate impact the damage mods have at this point but we have no data on any of the new ones. Once we get that data we’ll look for the best places to shave off power.
I have mixed (but more negative) feelings about it as well. I like that it’ll give more value to mobility abilities like Talon E. However, I really dislike the idea of narrower chokepoints in ARAM. You’re up against a team with Seraphine, Xerath, Veigar, Teemo, etc. and that’s an even more miserable stalemate. I guess good snowball usage can mitigate such concerns but still.
If you have to walk at the enemy, the narrower chokes can be a detriment to the pushing team, but simultaneously if the pokey champs push into you, it gives them less room to maneuver away from someone with a snowball gap closer. Hopefully you’ll be able to use them to make clever flash plays, but we’ll be monitoring what these changes do class by class
Whoever put Akali in every single one of those buff groups, I want what he’s having cause he’s smoking some shit that’s so strong even Snoop Dogg can’t handle it.
The intention is to use alternate buffs (like energy regen) rather than damage/durability when applicable so as to improve the skill floor of champions without making them expectation-breaking like they are on live.
Gotcha. Do you want Game IDs or just profiles?
Just profiles, I can identify the games pretty quick knowing them. I've been getting a lot of good submissions, it's been helpful
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