Buying grevious wounds into a champion that's already healing around 4000 per ability does nothing... It reduces it to 2400, but that's still alot..
Also shielding is even worse!
that means the item dealt 1600 damage per instance. We're not going to turn off healing entirely, but 1600 before you even count the stats of the item is a HUGE amount. There's no champion that's healing 4k per ability, that would be too much and we wouldn't try and solve that with an item.
Absolutely loving the game mode, made me come back to league.
But some champions need some love!
Artillery mages are horrible, most mages as well. Would be ncie to have more augments for them or some new items for them.
Same for Tanks (some of them), some tanks are doing well, like Mundo and Poppy who have damage, or things like Alistar that have a lot of CC. But other tanks are just forgotten, haven't seen a single Nautilus, Sejuani, Rammus do well.
Some augments could really make them shine.
We have some buffs to a couple artillery mages and tanks in 13.15. We're keeping an eye on them in general, and will likely look at the augment pool as well in balance updates going forward.
Do you like pie?
Yes. Only apple though. Otherwise cake is better.
What is the likelihood of adding more bans to help curtail the feeling of same-ness the mode has some of us feeling? Tired of seeing the same OP/annoying picks get through.
We're looking into resolving that "same champ every game" problem in multiple different ways. Right now there are several large balance outliers that we need to address which will help somewhat, but then we're going to try and look at better systemic solves that work long term.
will you add more ranks in the furture?
To reach Gladiator you have to hit 3800GR and the Rank 1 in Arena is almost at 9000GR atm
No plans to add more ranks right now. In the future we're likely to take a look at the ranked system and see if we should make adjustments. We want to see how this first run goes so we can design the ranked experience that's right for Arena.
Additionally, is this why you had the Hat stacking mode during April Fool's? To test out the hat tech for Arena?
Nope. SRT did that on their own, and we stole made use of their work.
Was having to hotfix balance the game at such a rapid pace something that was expected at launch?
I've been really loving this mode but I can only imagine how stressful it must be to push out balance patches so fast just to make sure the meta doesn't go stale
yeah, we knew we were going to do the hotfix after the first day. The second hotfix was unexpected; the meta developed far quicker than we were hoping. The first hotfix was also way larger than we were expecting, since we chose to go with the champion specific nerfs instead of the ARAM balance percent buff/nerf style of change. We're hopeful we won't need to continue doing a ton of hotfixes, and can rely on the patch-to-patch balance updates once the largest balance outliers are dealt with
How was the transition to four teams instead of the two teams + neutral team handled? Does the engine actually support more teams now, or are we still just swapping between one of two teams internally?
If still just two teams, then what prevents Soraka from ulting people in another fight? She can already ult untargetable "allies", so relationships wouldn't work, but maybe dimensions would? But then you'd need to swap us between dimensions so we can spectate right, or rework dimensions to allow visibility without targetability?
If we truly have more than two teams now, were any of the ideas above considered perhaps for early prototyping?
Regardless, what other issues, fixes, or workarounds did you run into getting the separate teams to work?
Had TFT already solved this issue, and if so do yall know anything about that process, what issues they ran into, or what issues yall ran into as a result of adapting their previous work?
"Generally we handle it with team swapping. There are still only two teams in League, so you get moved around to different teams when you get paired against another team. The engine is fairly hardcoded to only accept two teams.
The different matches happen in different dimensions, like you said, although Engineering did a lot of work to change Arena's version of the mechanic to allow things like spectating + disallow things like pings.
The first prototype was very hamfisted. There was no dimension tech in there, so random Ashe arrows would definitely find their way into the wrong arena :^D. Karthus and Soraka were banned for quite a while in early playtests. We also had to content with a lot of champion's not interacting well with team swapping, leading to a lot of temporary bandaid fixes in prototyping until we could make the tech work correctly.
TFT is a very different game and handles their combat very differently, so there wasn't much we could draw from (to my kn...
Could we see any augments that interact with emotes, for example, invincibility while dancing?
The original Warmup Routine triggered only off of using the explicit Dance emote until we sorted out our active augments. I think there's TONS of design space for cool augments that interact with different systems in League.
Will Arena be "The go to game mode" when it comes to events due to how customizable it is, or will older game modes still come back?
We're excited about Arena's potential for the future, and we're already talking about what we want to do for next steps. We do intent to keep supporting our other modes, but having to go full bore on Arena precluded us from working on them so far this year. No timeline for when we'll be able to bring back existing modes, but you haven't seen the last of URF.
What was probably the biggest difficulty while developing the mode?
The timeline for sure. We wanted to get it out for Soul Fighter's summer event, which was already a VERY quick turnaround, but getting hacked early in the year really put our timeline further behind. The fact that we have a mode at all is incredible, and the amount of polish that the team got into it was truly magical. The team super overperformed on this one and I'm real happy with where it ended up.
Any chances we get new items that will affect healing?
No current plans for new items. We did a bunch of rebalancing on the existing Grevious Wounds items to make them more competitive with other items for each class, so they're fairly reasonable options.
What were the thought behind bringing ranks to the mode. Was this gamemode ever intended do have "tryhards" playing the "META"? Or is it just something to offer replayability to the mode?
The major intention was to add in replayability. The presence of a ranked system does encourage more tryharding, but you still see that in unraked queues as well, as evidenced by pick urf being fairly dominated by the OPs even though there is zero ranked. I think overall ranked systems adding a bit of stakes to the game increases fun, but it was an intentional design that this ranked system is less about maximizing every single little edge than the Ranked SR experience.
Kinda springing off of that, are you happy with scaling vs earlygame champions?
How do plan to balance champions that tank early (less important) rounds, but get strong late--entirely around their lategame/hypothetical power, or assuming they might tank enough to get knocked out early?
Definitely not perfect. I think the game cadence works for now, but in the future I'd like us to do a pass on what advantage being an early game champion gains you that isn't snowballing out of control. I suspect it would be very hard to fix this safely in a short timeframe, so I'm hesitant to do it for this run of the mode, but its something I'd like us to look at in the future.
Why did you decide to make the hat potion cost as much as other potions instead of letting us delight in maximum hat overdrive by making it free or 50g?
Why do you deny Hats?!
The hats are made of the finest quality materials. You think Choncc should sell them at a LOSS!?
What’s the most hilarious bug you discovered while working on Arena?
My favorites are always the 'your auto attacks cast some kind of spell for some reason'. I think at some point some champion's auto attacks were firing shaco boxes? Technology is weird, yall.
What are the goals for class-specific viability? People have already noticed that AP assassins in general aren't the best, while enchanter-marksman duos are very powerful and juggernauts remain reliable. Will you aim to level out this disparity in the future, or accept that Arena's scrappy close-quarters gameplay rewards certain playstyles by definition?
Ultimately, we want every champion to be viable, and every comp to have a good time playing. Some combos will be better than others, and that's okay, it just means there's more to discover. What we don't want to have happen is that one class composition becomes dominant and the only way to win the game, or to have two classes that just cannot win a match together. The augments are intended to help equalize things across the classes and allow the weirder ones to win, even if on paper they're less powerful.
What was the design process behind the new items? They have some really interesting stat profiles (Tenacty + AS, Health + Crit) that we aren't used to in LoL since they seem meant to synergize with the augments.
Was just curious how you went about finding unique stat pairing that could offer new power fantasy to champs
There were two major classes of items that we added for the mode. The first is old items that players have a fondness for that we brought back. Zephyr is one of those. The other is items that we used to help bridge the gap on the Augments, like non ADCs needing Crit Chance. Rite of Ruin is one of those combining AP and Crit Chance. Generally we wanted there to be items that allowed you to build differently based on your augments, as well as just some items that people remembered fondly.
Why opt for allowing champ picks rather than more pseudo-random like ARAM? Random picks in itself is a strong balancing tool and would alleviate one of the current main complaints about specific duos outclassing the majority of other champ combos.
A lot of the fun of this mode is trying out combos and synergizing with your partner. I think that random champs or pseudo random is a pitch that solves a lot of the 'always see the same champ' problems when the meta settles. It's a problem that I want us to address in the future of the mode, but I don't think we have a clean solve yet.
What were your inspirations behind the mode?
The mode started with the premise of getting to play League without a lot of the internal friction caused by Summoner's Rift's core mechanics. How could we let people play with champions and explore those fantasies without worrying about a resource competition among your own team? Or without getting your lane frozen on you. From there we got to the concept of early exit, where you could be eliminated if you're having a bad game rather than having having to eke out small advantages from a losing position. The rest fell in after that. Augments were to provide variety of experience and give you new things to try every game, and the map + cameo design was built around making the 2v2 experience as smooth as possible.
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