ARAM Changes for 7.10

7.10 ARAM Followup Changes

Here’s a quick summary of where we’re at post-7.8 ARAM changes, and while it’s possible stuff in 7.9 will cause some major changes that will need to be responded to, here’s what we’re looking at and why. You'll start seeing these changes trickle out to PBE soon.

The Good Games in general are resolving slightly faster but more importantly stalled out games are actually ending and resolving. We’re seeing more back and forth and games are more action packed than before. While fun is subjective people in general seem to be enjoying the changes. Overall, we’re pretty happy with how games are shaking out but we’re still looking to make some changes in 7.10 to improve things.

The Less Good Even though "Stomps" do not appear to have increased, on a champion balance side with some exceptions (such as Sona who dropped last patch), many champions who were strong in ARAM got a bit stronger and many that were weaker got a bit weaker We're not aiming for anything near perfect balance for ARAM, and we won’t be doing champion specific balance for ARAM, but there are some small changes here we think can go a long way in bridging some of this gap.

So without further adieu, based off of feedback from the last round of changes and the results above, here’s what we’re looking at for 7.10

Super Minions Respawn/Timing - We like the strong pushes but we’re easing up on the respawn time of inhibitors to match the old number of waves. Minion waves dropped to 25 seconds from 30 seconds, so we’re dropping the inhibitor respawn times to 250 from 300 to match. This means they’ll still be strong but you’ll have a few less to deal with overall Shifting Armor <-> MR - Overall the minions are durable and we like that but the SR Armor / MR tuning isn’t quite ideal for ARAM so we’re shifting some of their Armor into MR to even out their killability a bit between carry types Out of Combat Movespeed This has successful in helping waves catch up with pushes and allowing them to keep up with champions, but had a few wonky unintended edge-cases such as super dodgy champions when it's meant to be a transit buff. As a result once a Super Minion enters combat this Out of Combat MS aura will be disabled for the remainder of its' lifespan.

Cannon Minions The very first wave will not have a Cannon Minion to start things off in a more neutral state We’re looking at alternating the Cannon Waves (Wave 2 - Blue Gets a Cannon, Wave 3 - Red, etc) The Goal here is to give to offset wave strength between waves to give teams with less wave clear a better chance to push out their lane and vary up the flow a little bit early on. Due to their being a small Blue side advantage still on ARAM we’re looking at starting with Blue Side getting the first Cannon Minion so that the small experience advantage goes to Red Side.

Melee Champions It’s a little inelegant but we’re looking at increasing early survivability of Melee champions with a flat MR boost (currently looking at +10). It’s unsurprising that Melee Champion struggle early in ARAM and they tend to get beaten up by primarily magic damage casters who on a map/mode with access to a lot more spellcasts in a narrow corridor tend to do well. This should soften up some of that early harass, with the buff being less meaniningful later as it becomes less needed later in the game.

Gold Flow We feel general gold flow is a bit low and many champions need that extra income to really turn on and start functioning so we’re kicking up the passive gold generation a bit. Expect a small increase in both the minion sharing gold and the ambient gold. We're roughly targeting "half an item" for the average game in terms of increase.

Snowball We like that other Summoner Spells are being seen with increasing frequency in ARAM but we feel that Snowball isn't carrying its' weight in the early game so we're buffing base damage a bit. This will obviously be most noticeable very early game. Snowball and Dash Damage 25-100 >> 40-115 True Damage

Guardian’s Line Feedback has been pretty consistent that the Guardian’s line is a little bit weak. We generally agree though to different extents on the different items. As a result we’re doing a small +50 Health Buff across the board and an additional small buff to the Hammer and Horn (+5 AD,and +50 Additional Health respectively).

Anyhoot, that's the quick "where we're at" for ARAM in 7.10. It won't be the end of the updates (we're looking at potentially doing a followup later this year) but we are going to ease off the gas after this patch for a while. We're additionally discussing some meta layer options, such as how rerolls, dodging, and champion pool options, work, etc but any changes in that space will not be included in this patch. Thanks for all the feedback and support from the last changes. Whether or not you agreed with all the changes in 7.8, the response has been really helpful is assessing and planning for this update.

Fist Bump,

• FeralPony