Boards›Maps & Modes

It's time to acknowledge that Mark is an unhealthy novelty

Mandaari·7/13/2015, 4:29:05 AM·35 votes·5,382 views

Every prediction that I've presented about this spell has come true. I'm sick of seeing it and I'm sick of people thinking that it's helping balance. It's not.

All that Mark does for most melees is make it feel like you can do more by allowing you to engage from farther away than you deserve to. In reality you're just engaging to your death, just like before. Meanwhile, all of the poke heavy champions still have insanely high winrates and tanks that already had high win rates moved even higher. Galio is still sitting at 65%. So are Heimer and Sona. Sure, some oppressive champions' win rates went down slightly, but they just swapped places with some other oppressive champions. And yes, some weak champions' win rates went up slightly, but not much. I believe the highest someone went up was Udyr from ~40% to ~42%. Take a look at the lowest winrate champions on HA for the last week and tell me that mobility was their problem.

I don't want to see 60%+ win rate anyone, but snowball was not the way to go about it. ARAM is in a worse state than before snowball was added. Riot, come talk about some better ways to go about balancing ARAM.

http://i.imgur.com/IMIDINS.png

http://i.imgur.com/36HWs7t.png

The fact that Riot won't even respond to this is sad. If they really cared about balancing ARAM Mark would have been long gone.

At the very least you owe us your data. Give us the the ARAM win rates for everyone through March. Then let's have an objective comparison of how much of a shitstorm Mark is.

86 Comments

AMYS GRAVE7/13/2015, 4:38:18 AM9 votes

This is what people don't seem to understand. We don't dislike it for no reason, it hasn't performed the job it actually was meant to perform.

BakugoBestBoy7/13/2015, 1:12:19 PM8 votes

ARAM is impossible to balance. Considering the only option is to constantly 5v5, 90% of the game's outcome is decided at champ select (the other 10% is decided upon whether or not your whole team connects to the game xD). SR has multiple strategies that allows for all champions to thrive in some form, but that simply doesn't exist in ARAM. So either you limit the champion pool or make it less random. Neither of which is good for a game mode called "ALL RANDOM all mid".

The only thing you can do is just accept these realities and make the most of a 1 sided match up. I played 5 ARAMs yesterday and 4 of the 5 were decided at champ select. 2 easy wins, 2 easy losses and 1 actual game where teams were even and we came out on top. That was a good day in ARAM. I've had streaks of 5-6 bad team comps in a row and just had to stop for the day, but it's nothing that stops me from coming back and playing more.

So while I get where you're coming from, and agree snowball did nothing to fix ARAM, it also didn't ruin anything that was functioning super well in the first place.

Minarde7/13/2015, 7:06:24 AM6 votes

It's an issue of playerbase expectations and differences in knowledge.

As with all of the alternate game modes, people generally aren't exposed to high-level play. It's arguably worst in ARAM because it's the game mode people most often link to "casual fun." And that's the problem. Casuals like the spell because "flying around like Lee Sin is fun," and it makes for Big Plays. Regulars like the spell because of the mistaken belief that poke is king in ARAM because melee can't engage. Only a tiny minority of players realize "maybe Mark/Dash actually doesn't solve the problem it was intended to address."

UPfreely7/13/2015, 6:25:33 PM6 votes

There's a reason I don't play aram anymore.

I Am Abømination7/13/2015, 7:16:45 PM6 votes

This cancerous spell needs to be removed from ARAM. Yes it helps some small percentage of champs who had poor engage, but mostly it's just OP now on all the champs who didn't need it.

qetzel7/13/2015, 3:58:37 PM4 votes

It fixed the problem that I had. As you said, it makes me feel I can do more.

That is what I didn't like about ARAM. I felt useless on those champions, which frustrated me. I am no longer as frustrated.

Lugg7/13/2015, 7:11:03 AM3 votes

It shouldn't do any damage. It should allow melee champions to get in melee range and that's it.

Saianna7/13/2015, 8:02:37 AM2 votes

I'm quite surprised LB doesn't have high win-rate. I realy am surprised!

I like snowballs, yes i know they migh be kind of unbalanced/unhealthy, but still they change the way we play, which is nice.

Also hae in mind that ALOT of retards get snowball no matter what champion they use. Andthen they ust throw it for "MUH DAMAGE"...