Boards›Gameplay

ARAM %-Based Champion Adjustments

Lilybun·9/9/2019, 6:44:20 AM·7 votes·7,163 views

I'd like to preface this by saying that I'm an ARAM enthusiast (over 4000 games played) and aside from the occasional rotating mode it's basically all I play in LoL anymore. It's the only mode that I've played for the past 5 or so years and recently I've been getting less and less enjoyment out of it due to one specific decision on Riot's behalf, %-based champion adjustments. Is ARAM a balanced mode? Not really. Can ARAM still be fun? Absolutely. Can you express skill in ARAM? Not nearly as much as before and that's why I'm making this post.

The Crux of the Issue: My problems with the mode started earlier this year with the great ARAM patch 9.7 that introduced the one thing that I think is ruining the mode: ARAM-specific %-based damage adjustments. At first I thought it was great that this side game mode that I love is getting attention and balance changes but it's become evident to me after hundreds of games why this kind of % change adjustment style is not used anywhere else in the game and why it isn't a viable way to balance a skill and counterplay-based game such as LoL. What it does in essence is remove significant amounts of skill from the game by making matchups more polarized (win harder, lose harder). When you amp damage or damage taken there's going to be less counterplay and thus less meaningful decisions to make, both from the winning and losing side of a matchup. I'll elaborate on the reasoning further a bit later

First let's look at a quick example of the most egregious % adjustment based matchup currently to throw some numbers out there: Akali VS Sona

  • Akali has currently (9.17) +18% damage dealt and -12% damage taken
  • Sona has -15% damage dealt and +15% damage taken
  • Both champions are at lvl 9
  • Both have 1 item (Gunblade vs Archangel at 50% stacks)
  • Both cast 1 Q at each other from within 900 range
  • Runes and other champion auras ignored for simplicity

The damage goes as follows:

  • Akali Q deals 190 damage to Sona (19% max hp)
  • Sona deals 131 damage to Akali (11% max hp) Akali is at 89% hp, Sona is at 81% hp = 8% life total difference after ONE spell cast

But wait, those are the normal game numbers, in ARAM the damage numbers are a bit different:

  • Akali Q deals **258 **damage to Sona (26% max hp)
  • Sona deals **92 **damage to Akali (8% max hp) Akali is at 92% hp, Sona is at 74% hp = 18% life total difference after ONE spell cast That's a 35.7% damage increase for Akali and a -29.8% damage decrease for Sona, skewing this matchup beyond any sense

Is Akali going to beat Sona in a 1v1 with even items and levels? Probably yes in both modes, it's a matchup dependent thing. Can Sona outplay Akali and make a daring escape to a tower, scare the assassin off by dodging a few skillshots etc? Absolutely not in ARAM anymore, no tower is going to save a Sona from that damage output and Akali has access to a snowball in ARAM on top of her 4 built-in dashes. It should be obvious from the above example that with these damage adjustments there's practically 0 possibility to outplay an Akali or any other damage amplified champion as someone who takes massively increased damage. I understand that Sona is a far better ARAM champion on average and that Riot is trying to bring her winrate closer to 50% as well as boost Akali's winrate up to 50% but this is not the way to go about it, it affects the play-counterplay foundation of LoL far too much.

Why This Doesn't Work: Sona and all the other cleric supports are still going to win every single game where they get to be paired with poke champions against worse poke champions, worse clerics or squishy/ult-dependent melee characters with no waveclear regardless of the % adjustments, the matchups are unchanged fundamentally as we explored in our earlier example. The aforementioned poke vs poke matchups seems to be what most people gravitate towards when rolling for champions in ARAM and as a result certain champions will dominate the pickrate and winrate charts. Even with a 50% damage taken increase Sona is still going to be just as annoying in the matchup where no one gets to touch her and instantly lose all of the ones where she can be engaged upon, maybe that dichotomy would amount to a 50% winrate but more than that it would result in a consistently awful gameplay experience as there's no meaningful player interaction in either matchup.

What these % adjustments do to the game is turn losing matchups on nerfed champions to borderline unwinnable games and winning matchups on buffed champions to near guaranteed wins. It does not fix the core issues that the mode has with champion balance, instead a significant portion of skill is taken away from every single ARAM game that these champions with adjustments are present in.

Is it nice to have a permanent Deathfire Grasp active on all your opponents as a LeBlanc when facing some squishy ADC? Sure, you will get a guaranteed kill on your target with even a botched combo where you miss half your spells. Will it help you kill that big boi Trundle that's clubbing your face in? Absolutely not. How is gameplay affected by LB having a built-in permanent DFG (and damage resistance)?

  • The squishy victim of LB can no longer express skill by outplaying LB because LB's damage is so heavily amplified
  • LB can no longer express skill by flawlessly landing every combo because their targets die halfway through the rotation
  • thicc boi Trundle can barely feel the difference because he eats burst mages for breakfast

Matchup unchanged, skill reduced, counterplay removed. That's my main issue with the % based ARAM adjustments that started with patch 9.7 and why I'm struggling to find as much enjoyment from the mode in the past few months. If it's not obvious already this is not limited at all to the champions I mentioned, even the untouched characters have to deal with their teammates imploding at the sight of a buffed character or with their frontline going 1v5 because they simply cannot die to a bunch of nerfed mages. And no, I'm not advocating for simply tuning these % adjustments to be less powerful, I think they'd have to be unnoticeably small to not have a negative impact on the game at which point they shouldn't exist in the first place. If there's one % based change I'd like to see it would be to change the howling abyss aura "Reduces all outgoing heals by 50%. The healing reduction does not affect self-heals" to also include shields but general ARAM balance is a different topic entirely.

Conclusion/tldr: Please Riot, remove these % based adjustments from ARAM. I fully understand they make the winrate data look much nicer but they are horrible for skill expression in the game and actually do very little to adjust the larger balance issues of an all-random all-mid mode. No adjustment ARAM was more enjoyable and skill-based than the howling abyss we have now. Permanently slapped on bandaid fixes that reduce skill have no place in a game like League of Legends, not even in the ARAM.

15 Comments

Silent Crescendo9/9/2019, 6:19:32 PM4 votes

Don't worry, trying to buff the mechanically difficult and high-risk high-reward Champions to have a 50% winrate in a mode where a large majority of the people that end up playing them probably don't even have 20 games on them ever is a perfectly reasonable and sane idea.

It's lazy, honestly. They don't want to put any effort into addressing why certain Champions have high or low winrates, and instead make them a baseline X% better or worse so the winrate chart looks more "fair". But they don't even play the mode at all. Some Champions like Khazix Kaisa Shyvana Zoe get buffed when anyone with 100 or more games could tell you they need nerfs.

Cocho9/9/2019, 7:01:16 AM3 votes

It feels odd to play so many summoner's rift games, know the damage champions do with 'x' items at 'x' levels, then play aram, and that damage is just not what I know. Throws experience out of the window.

BackdoorPrincess9/9/2019, 12:25:43 PM2 votes

It's also not really shown until you're in game what champs have it, and even then only if you read the tooltip that everyone has, just the champs that have adjustments also have a line or two added to it. Then there's also the base heal nerf, on top of the per champ heal nerf, which a lot of enchanters end up getting adjustments to their shields/heals anyways, so now you have to watch 3 different stats calculate into 1. You have poke nerfs past x units, and then also those same poke champs have nerfs on them as well, leaning aram towards a more bruiser/tank-centric meta, with the exception of a few close range mage/nukes (cass/brand/liss/etc).

Ziggs anymore feels better to go liandries lichbane than any other build, just because of the guarenteed burn and tower damage, because the poke nerfs on top of his specific nerfs just feel super lame to land a max range q to see 40 damage pop up, when that cait just chunked a quarter of your health from one auto

At this point, aram should be like it is on pbe where you have every champ unlocked in it, you just dont gain rewards unless you own them, and completely eliminate the poke nerfs to focus either on champ specific nerfs or flat out nerfs. Its super obvious that although it might not be a fun game, bruisers/tanks beats poke 9 times out of 10 after like 15 minutes, just based on passive gold generation alone. ADC's should be looked at more than poke mages, and none of the changes should be hidden stats in game, and should show in the client either as a banner whilst searching/choosing champs (since you don't have to champ select theres a large portion of the screen you can use) for general nerfs (as in the 50% heal reduction/after x units damage reduction as it stands), or giant fucking smiley or frownie faces to let you know to hover over to see just how jacked or fucked the champ you have is for the specific changes.

Also, if you're gonna keep the poke nerfs, can you change it so traps aren't fucking affected by it? Super obnoxious to be jinn/teemo/shaco/etc. and see someone walk into your trap only to see the shield pop up on every damage tick significantly cutting your damage THAT IS ALREADY HARDCOUNTERED BY 300 GOLD FOR 5 MINUTES. Same thing goes for donger turrets and probably more examples I can't think of, at this point I'd say to just make it projectile/laser specific, but knowing how windwall works all of it is probably coded weird anyways

Jaspers9/9/2019, 3:57:55 PM2 votes

I totally agree.

ARAM has a different playstyle, it's confined space means certain champs excel where others don't. The ones that don't are utility tanks (Braum, Poppy) who have limited range and hard engage or assassins as they will be dog-piled if they go in. This is just how it is.

Yet Riot have done what they can to make assassin's lives easier (while Poppy and Braum have no buffs at all, they have 46% winrates).

Akali's buff doesn't mean just 18% extra damage, once she has Gunblade it's also more healing because she's doing more damage. Not only that, Gunblade active will do more damage as well.

But you know what's weird. Akali's win rate in ARAM is 48%. Leblanc's is 46%. No amount of bonus damage will help them, it's about surviving and even with -8% damage taken they still will get dog-piled because that is how ARAM works. An assassin's job in aram is to take out a carry then die, not survive and oneshot all the ADCs with 2 abilities while moving at mach 4 across the map. :P

I think the longer they leave the damage buffs in the harder time they will have removing them.

floo9/9/2019, 11:45:02 PM1 votes

To all those people agreeing on this and to OP:

What?

Those % changes are there because of a reason. You're saying it removes counterplay, but you do you remember how much counterplay there was to champs like Ziggs or Xerath before? Right, there was none unless you had a good engage comp, a hook or an equal shitload of spammable poke. How is a 50% winrate not an indicator to more fair play? If one champ dominates the game with a 60%+ winrate, just because they can sit behind and spam QWE without having to actually interact with their enemy, then that's not fair. Soraka sitting behind the backline with warmogs spamming W? Kai'Sa full AP at her nexus spamming W? That's not interactive and should be adjusted, wtf. Pokemages and enchanters thrive in this mode because they are always as 5 and nobody can come from a sidelane or a jungle. They can hardly be engaged on and shut down, which is their weakness.

Also what does Sona vs Akali in a 1v1 have to do with anything? Unless morbidly fed, Sona would lose in any scenario.

Those % adjustments are not about 1v1 cases. They are considering the constant teamfight 5v5 that ARAM actually is. Therefor champions like LeBlanc, who are usually bad in teamfights, get bonus damage. You cannot change their individual abilities, because it would be too much work for an additional mode, and would also bring the entire champions too far from their original state. % damage dealt/taken and healing are the only approach to this.

Pika Fox9/10/2019, 3:06:26 PM1 votes

This isnt a good example to use, because youre just throwing out numbers with no context.

Akali is an assassin, the weakest archtype in aram. Sona was the undisputed queen #1 in aram.

Of course akali will have buffs and sona will have nerfs, and of course they will be substantial.

Yes % changes are not ideal, but they are quick and dirty and get the job done for a non primary mode.