As a person who only has time to play ARAMs any more I think the changes seem pretty painful. Matches are usually pretty lopsided in ARAM, you know that going in. But things like dark harvest and warmogs added a bit of balance to things are that not inherently balanced. I am reserving judgement till I see some of the changes because I feel like butchers bridge is not a great place to personally get a feel for balance since the the field of view, at least in my opinion is much tighter. It is hard to keep a Kai'Sai poke in mine if their completely off your screen. So I will just go over what I have seen on the from my few games since the update.
There is no risk versus reward when you nerf the heck out of dark harvest. Did it need a nerf? Probably, it promoted snowball comps and a much faster pace of play. Which meant if you got what should have been an amazing late game hyper carry they were far less fun, because by late game there were at least one or two champs that could absolutely blow you up. But on the other hand it gave the tanks some teeth without having to sacrifice their front line tanking and initiating. I will admit I am not really sure how you would balance dark harvest. It did wonderful things for a mundo making him more than just a hard to kill annoyance and got rid of a lot of the wet noodle fights. But on the other hand it also meant that a halfway fed Irelia became practically unstoppable. As it stands right now it is an extremely painful balance tweak for melee assassins.
As for warmogs it was cancer. I should not be able to build a full tank Veigar and still have 800+ ap by the end of the game. I know it would be a lot of work but if you hard coded classes into tanks bruisers assassins mages et all into champions you could give them class specific items. It would discourage off meta play for sure but we have already seen that Riot is not the biggest fan of that. You could also build in proximity sensors like gargoyles stone plate. For instance something that is similar to warmogs that is ARAM specific that gains increased regeneration the more allies you have around you. That way you don't have a single bruiser able to hold back a three man push. But if your tank survives the fight there is a reward for holding the line till your team can back you up again. That way your tank is also ready for the initiate when the time comes.
A lot of what happens in ARAM has to do with the nature of the disorganized team. It is rare that you can come up with high level plays or have a team that is capable of reading each others play styles and reacting accordingly. When that does happen it doesn't really matter (to a point) what your comp is. Good coordination will almost always outdo balance issues in team selection.
To the people who are saying your should never be hit by a skill shot in ARAM, that is the perspective that I tend to see coming in from ranked players who are used to playing in a somewhat polite lane setting. Slipping between one or two skill shots in lane is a respectable skill, when you have as many as five players all spamming poke at around three to five second intervals your going to get hit some. Sometimes you have to take the poke instead of a team mate taking it as well. If shaving off as much as several hundred of my life means the difference early game of the enemy team getting a couple hundred gold you better believe that I am going to move in front of that shot.
The issues in ARAM are more player based that game balance based. You start at level three with a good chunk of a full item so people go in and dive as though they were a full built carry from the start. It is not unusual to around thirty kills between both teams by the twelve minute mark. Either that or you will see one team hiding under tower hoping to passively gain enough gold that their first back is effective enough to get them their first full item, while the team that is in control has gained a potential 240 gold difference in just the first three waves. But these are all playstyle problems not things that Rito can balance or force people to do.
tl;dr:
Aram will never be actually balanced, your always going to see things that make you face palm. The current balance on the bridge favors cc/poke comps without much recourse for tanks. Some of that is things that Rito can fix some of that is players faults. I feel for the guys at Rito trying to keep this a fun if off kilter game style.
[slayer-pantheon-popcorn]
