Onslaught is a perfect example of difficulty done wrong.

The new game mode looked really awesome when they first teased it. PvE modes are sorely lacking in this game, and the one we got...was a pretty miserable experience once the novelty wore off.

Fast forward to today and we have one of the most promising PvE modes ever to hit League.........until you actually get in game. There are SO many frustrating elements to this game mode, so many "design don't"s scattered around, that this game mode is a broken mess. It's not all bad though. Credit where it's due, the map is beautiful, and I very much enjoy the city aesthetic. The art team did a good job.

So now I'm going to break down each element that sucks about this game mode. 1: The Vel'koz Clones. This was a very poorly designed enemy. By itself, it's alright, it's nothing too overbearing. But then each level likes to spawn 12 of them far away from each other, and the game turns into a frustrating and unfair bullet hell of you trying to dodge each shot that chunks you for a decent amount of damage for each one that lands, while the other mobs blast your ass without you being able to stop and respond lest you eat a Vel'koz projectile. This strains a player's ability to focus, and leads to frustration when it inevitably kills them.

2: Reviving team mates is dumb and usually not worth it. I have never seen a game mode that hates selfless sacrifice as much as I have in this one. The option to revive team mates is fine, and almost necessary in a PvE mode (Just look at the Overwatch Uprising event). But when you try to revive someone in this mode, more often than not, you fuck yourself over and the person you revived as well. Why? THEY COME BACK WITH THE SAME AMOUNT OF HEALTH YOU HAVE WHEN YOU REVIVE THEM. Why the fuck is that the case?! Do you not know how easy it is to just straight up die immediately after reviving someone that way? And the invulnerability period does nothing, because there is such a thick blanket of overlaid AOE and CC that it's pretty much a given you're going to get caught up in it the second the period wears off. This mechanic is poorly implemented and it should have been made so that successfully reviving someone heals BOTH members of the team to full health, since there's no consistent way to actually get health back without having a Soraka on the team.

3: I have 6 item slots and at most I get to use 3 and a half of them. Why are you so sparing with the amount of gold given at the end of each round? In fact, it usually isn't until round 3 or 4 that you get to fully complete an item, and you usually get your second completed item when the mode is almost over (assuming you actually made it that far through the ball numbing hell of Vel'koz fire and death). If you intended players to get so little itemization, why didn't you beef up the power of those items so that they made up for the loss of stats and damage? It especially doesn't help when the Rek'sais that are constantly knocking you up take forever to die because they all have 3000 health yet melt the hell out of you.

I could go on, but these are my three main issues with the game mode. These don't feel like challenges, they feel like unfair artificial difficulty. There is a literally fucking giant hurricane of death coming towards my house that could kill me as I type this, and I feel like THAT is more fair to me about how many options I have to deal with that situation than this game mode gives me to deal with its situations.

tl;dr: Vel'koz clones are designed unfairly, reviving needs to be tweaked heavily in favor of the player if the difficulty level persists, not having access to full itemization sucks when enemies are so powerful