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Howling Abyss map changes feedback (@L4T3NCY)

LostFr0st·6/20/2016, 7:11:42 AM·7 votes·1,043 views

First, I want to say it's nice for ARAM to have changes like this. It's good to shake stuff up. I would have liked to have posted this sooner, but I couldn't get a good enough read of the changes on Pbe (not enough games).

I'll separate the changes into neutral =, positive +, and negative** -** , with one confounding variable.

+ Poro snax: very nice change. I’ve seen more poros explode so far this patch than in the past 2 months combined. The herd of poros is cute; glad to see it more often. = Howling Abyss Summoner Spell Cooldowns: not huge meta-breaking changes, but will take some tweaking and getting used to.
+ Clarity changes sound good; hope it doesn't become a meta summoner spell due to the relic changes.
- For Mark/Dash I do not think a cooldown increase was necessary. With the reduced cd on escape spells and the reduction in width and increased visibility it is both harder to hit and harder to stick once you do go in. Combine that with the risk of them flashing your sorry butt into their tower and you have a high risk, much lower reward spell. I’d rather take my chances with flash+ghost or even flash+ignite on Udyr. + Homestart: very nice addition to the map, helps out with bush cheese mitigation. + Experience Pacing: good changes, it’s nice to have the levels to fight the enemy team while on the backfoot. +/- Gold Pacing: This is where some of the changes get iffy. I get that the ambient gold was increased, but why increase and flatten the minion values? This enhances the gulf that builds between the winning and losing team. The team pushed against their turret will always lose gold; we’re literally back to where we were before snowball was introduced in terms of optimal team comps. Just poke and shove=win because you’ll starve the enemy team. +/- Health packs: If you’re going to increase the cd and lower the mana why not increase the health gain? The winning team will gain nothing from that if they pick it up for mana, and it would help the team on the defending side more. + BRUSHING UP: nice change, makes it so you have some more time between seeing a skillshot exit the other bush and enter yours. + BREATHING ROOM: tiny bit of outer turret space is nice, allows some wiggle room while getting poked at. - BASE JAM: The size increase is tiny (like 1 or 2ish tiles maybe I think?) but makes it easier for the attacking team to fight. Cracking open the chokepoint was part of the game, and was where most comebacks would happen. The defending team might as well fight on the bridge now because getting a fight near/under the towers is even harder. +/- FROZEN AND ALONE: While I understand the removal of underused items, I don’t understand why the item sets were all changed to guardian items. The guardian items are not all efficient nor the best starts for many champions. Guardian's Hammer is hands down the most successful of the three, followed by Guardian's Horn if you’re vs. a spamming comp. Guardian’s Orb is not a good item for most mages, especially for its price. Lost Chapter is almost always the better pickup, even if you don’t upgrade it to Morello’s. I still can’t figure out why guardian’s orb costs 950 when it gives the base stats of two Doran’s rings without the passive (and that’s if your champ has 5 mana regen as their stat; almost nobody has mana regen that low.). 30HP =/= 150g. I could have bought double dorans+3pots for that before. +/- Oracle's Extract: I understand the intent. I like how it makes stealth champs more viable later in the game (when vision items used to be rampant). However, it makes it so we cannot diffuse any traps at all. What is the actual counterplay for traps now? = Potions: Neutral change. Personally I don’t think the game is long enough to validate buying such an expensive potion-holder, but I’ll leave that choice to my peers. I’m sure Singed and Pantheon probably like it.

Confounding Variable: I can't get a clear read on Double-edged sword vs/combined with Expose weakness yet, but I feel it's snowballing some games a bit more that it's intended to. I can't be sure though.

Thank you for your time,

-LostFr0st

p.s. If I missed anything guys please tell me below! It'd be nice to get multiple opinions on these changes.

17 Comments

Blue Moon Wolf6/20/2016, 3:24:16 PM2 votes

Great work, I hope this makes it to Riot. They did make some good changes but the fact that ARAM has returned to being all about the pokes makes it hard to appreciate some of the better changes like Homestart.

Zielmann6/20/2016, 3:28:55 PM2 votes

It's interesting to see other's feedback, because I feel significantly different about a lot of things. Your format covers most things, so I'll follow it.

++ Poro Snax - Definitely awesome. Only question is that the notes made it read like only the first team to take a tower would get bonus Poro Snax, but currently both teams are getting them upon taking their first tower.

- Summoner Spell CDs - Not a fan at all, honestly. Particularly the massive reduction on the CD of flash. Snowball has already enabled high-engage threats to become dominant in the game. Now the CD on flash is so low that they can use it as an easy alternative if they miss the snowball (or to reposition after snowball) far too reliably. I find teams with high engage potential to be extremely oppressive now (where they were already oppressive before just because of snowball). This actually talks to a point of contention I have with the entire perception of what's good in ARAM, though, and that's that tanks with engage win games, not so much poke.

+ Clarity changes - Solid. I have yet to take it myself, but have actually considered it as an alternative now. Though I personally still lean more toward exhaust if I'm not taking snowball.

++ Snowball changes - This needed to happen much sooner. Snowball was still too easy to hit and too free of an engage tool with little downside to missing it. Even though it's not a huge increase, missing the snowball feels a little more substantial now. And along with that, following up on it feels that much more rewarding because you notice that the spell is up faster. Smaller hitbox is also great. Makes it a bit easier to dodge. The visual change for me was pretty much not needed, cause I was used to seeing the old snowballs anyhow, so it's no easier or harder to spot them coming for me. But if it helps others on my team avoid them, then great!

= Homestart - I have yet to see this have much of an impact on the game. My only thought would be that since it allows us to get into lane sooner, perhaps pushing the minion spawn time up a bit would be nice. There's a lot of down time early where you're just posturing with the other team and waiting for minions to show up. That, or you break into a super early fight but still get back to lane and stare at each other before minions arrive.

- Experience Pacing - This is a big miss for me. I'd be fine with flattening experience gains a little bit for kills early on, but overall experience on the map is too fast now. Remember my gripe with engage tanks? They now get to hit their stride that much earlier, shrinking the window of opportunity for the poke/siege team to actually make any headway. I haven't tested this yet, but I also am wondering if exp. quints will be even better now, given the overall higher amount of exp available.

-- Gold Pacing - Massive miss here, and really threatens the game in my eyes, especially when you pair it with the Exp. increases, too. With this, not only are your engage tanks finding it easier to engage than ever (flash cd + existence of snowball) and reaching critical levels sooner than ever, they're also able to build up their tank items faster than ever. The squishier your team is, the more critical it is to have mixed damage types against the tankier team, otherwise they'll be able to have either 200+ armor or MR absurdly early in the game. Damage has a hard time keeping up with what the tanks are able to get.

= Health Packs - Mana is already not an issue if you're doing it right, so less mana from them isn't a huge deal. And by doing it right, I mean either starting Catalyst or Lost Chapter on a mage. It'll either be nice or frustrating (depending on which team you're on) when you run into one of those Nidalees who starts NLR...

+ Brush change - Does what was intended. Not much to say.

+ Breathing Room - See above.

= Base Jam - Necessary change given the modified game pacing. Easier to lose that stronghold of your own base, but easier to crack theirs. Probably could have been left as-is if the pacing weren't ramped up so much.

- Item changes - I'll address the three main things separately

  • Vision items: I think we need these back. Oracles isn't enough, even with it lasting through death now. It's harder to get allies to buy oracles when needed than it ever was to get them to buy one of the other vision items. I'd prefer that they bring back the old vision items and also add an AP variant so that anybody from any role could conceivably buy one if needed.

  • Guardian's items: These are pointless, and frankly traps, imo. At the 950 price point, there are far better items to start with on anything. I guess the defensive one is probably the most compelling. But I'd rather start off with a set of resistances or health, depending on what I'm up against, that builds me into that first full item faster. Mages should almost all be starting either Lost Chapter or Catalyst. BF Sword, Warhammer, or Dirk are far better starting options for AD champs.

  • Potions: Seem a bit pointless, especially if you run the mastery for biscuits. You get more out of the biscuits than you do the refillable potion, and you can buy more pots than you get potion charges. Pots are strongest early game where you need the sustain to get past the early poke, so starting with 3-5 pots is vastly preferable as it gives much more early sustain.

So in summary, I feel like the changes only made the hidden problems of the game worse. I feel like the misconception of 'poke wins games' is perpetuated by the casual ARAM audience, and the changes were targeted as such. In reality, the game has always been a delicate balance between pokes and engage. Engage has always been the way to deal with poke, and past a certain point in the game, high-engage would almost always win out. Before snowball, it would take over 20 minutes for the game to really start turning in the favor of the engage team. Adding snowball dropped it closer to 17 minutes when the tanky engage teams would start to reach critical mass. Now it's happening more around 15 minutes, from what I've seen, because of the gold and exp pacing, paired with higher availability of flash for engaging.

All these changes seem to me like they're slowly lengthening the game (seems counter-intuitive given the increased pacing). But it amounts to a slow tug-of-war now where over time, the tanky team starts going even, and then barely winning fights but can't yet push out. Finally they get big enough to outright win fights. Going through this slow losing process against teams like that is very, very draining and discouraging.

One thing that I think would help, given the pacing changes, is if death timers actually increased a bit as well (these are a lot of what is dragging the games out, imo). While the poke/siege teams are still winning fights against the engage tanks but they're getting closer and closer, the fights drag out longer and longer. But this point is reached early enough that death timers are so short that players start to get back to lane and nobody can really push out at all.

After this weekend, I hit what was probably the second time ever that I've started to feel a little burned out on ARAM (the first being right after snowball was introduced in it's massively OP state). Now, more than ever, I feel like I can see how a game will go based on comps alone. I feel like actually playing smart to try to work with the comp you have has been overshadowed by raw champion power because of the pacing changes.