ARAM Changes - Feedback
If you don't want to read it all then sure, it's fine... Here's the short form: It's Onesided with all comeback possibilities removed.
Let's start it off by analyzing the Patch Notes for the Howling Abyss. First off I would like to quote them:
When playing ARAM people are usually looking for a shorter game, but sometimes what ends up happening is a tug-of-war of inhibitor pushes till someone really screws up. We want to reduce the scenarios where that happens reducing average time per game in the proccess.
Gold Pacing: The 3 extra gold are a good addition for ARAM since only a single person would've received gold out of the minions. If you do simple maths a single minion is even more gold worth in total than before. A melee minion had an executioner reward of 28 gold which got reduced to 20 gold but due to the gold share it increases by 12 gold and the melee minion ends up with a total amount of 32 gold rather than 28. The melee minions were worth 20 gold and got reduced to 17 but maths again: They're worth 29 gold in total.
Removed Items: The removal of the Support items isn't worth it. These items were part of the best items which you could have in ARAM and the minion gold changes aren't compensating this good enough. The removal of Cull is literally making no change - I have seen about 2-5 Cull's in more than 3,000 played ARAMs.
Health Relics: The earlier spawn of the relics is harmoning well with the earlier minion spawn but the change to the heal is literally tank focused. It heals tanks more than it does to carry champs.
Assists: Same as the Gold Pacing. This helps the team out more because if you've a champion with AOE damage and you die during the fight then it will take more than 10 seconds before the 5th champion of the enemy team has been slain. Expecially when it's a tank. For the tower gold you can think it this way: If your team dies and your last team mate alive is a tank then you have it.
Minion Spawns: The initial spawn time went down to 00:45, which allows player to engange into fights even faster but it's still in a dangerous area. Every wave spawns 5 seconds earlier which allows you to siege more and faster than before together with the siege minions spawning every wave since the initial spawn wave. Minions now get stronger every 60 seconds. This is too quick if linked with the Super Minion changes.
Super Minions: Now let's come to my most disliked change. The Super Minions have received 70 additional armor and got a base ad increasement of 126. At minute 21 a single super minion has 411 AD, 100 AR and -30 MR. If you really want to make Super Minions more of a focus than at least bring up their MR too. Given scenario: You're playing full tank Garen, your team dies and you're the only one alive and it happens that you manage to ace the enemy team BUT there are Super Minions alive which are attacking your Nexus. You might not even be able to defend this if there are more than 2 Super Minions alive with your Nexus being below 50% HP. Given the same scenario with the following change: You're playing Ziggs. The Super Minions will melt like butter.
The Inspire buff is pretty much a call for "Respawn while they're dead, rush to their base and end this".
Recall: The tooltip is now saying "But you can still express yourself baby" ... Umm.. Am I playing League of Legends or am I in a talent show trying to show off my erotic dancing?
Poros: This isn't gameplay changing. Just a cosmetic change.
I've spent the whole day playing ARAM to farm IP and every single game ended up the same: Have a champion that is extremely strong in ARAM once fed, for example Lux, then the whole game is decided by a single champion. If they get your two towers then you still have a chance of coming back but once your inhibitor has fallen it's basically already a lost game. The only way to win is by hoping that the enemy team will throw the game.
Before Patch 7.8 it hasn't been that extremely one-sided. If your inhibitor was down you still were able to defend it as full tank Garen. You could get yourself ahead in the beginning by getting a support item. But seriously the main reason why every single game started to be more and more one-sided resulted of the minion changes. Some players didn't realize that the game started so the enemy team had it a bit easier to push towards your tower in the beginning of the game. Due to the quicker scaling and the ridiciously strong super minions it's even harder to turn a 4v5 or even to defend alone. The game times got quicker, but this has (at least in my games) a requirement. In average an ARAM I play has a game time of 20-30 minutes but given the condition that one team has a champion that is strong in ARAM (i.e. Lux, Master Yi) let every single game with that condition end at minute 17. This turns ARAM to an one-sided game mode which relies on getting good champions and now imagine if you get 4 tanks a support champion.
Dear Riot Games team: You've achieved it, that the games are quicker but in my opinion you've overdone it. The change to the Super Minions wasn't needed to get the games end faster. If you're trying to win a game after your inhibitor got destroyed then the game falls into a "tug-of-war of inhibotr pushes" state which causes the game to exceed 35+ minutes to end. And if I may go back to my quote in the beginning of this thread: You wanted to prevent this but what you've created is literally the key to 30+ minutes games.
